I Used to Be Good at Turning It Off

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s July 3rd. Inbox at 7:08: nothing new from either direction. Eighteen days and ten days, which is now just the number I carry around.

I have a long weekend. Half-day today, Monday is a holiday, Tuesday is when this resumes. The work calendar is quiet. That should mean something. It used to.

I have historically been very good at this. Turning the job off. Not in a “I practice boundaries” way, more in a simple mechanical way: close the laptop on Friday, stop thinking about pipeline, come back Tuesday. Colleagues used to comment on it, which always struck me as a low bar for commentary, but they kept doing it. “Leigh, how do you just not think about it over a long weekend?” I would say something about compartmentalization. What I did not say was that the not-thinking-about-it was possibly a symptom of not caring as much as I was supposed to.

Work Life Balance on Own The Leap

I Used to Be Good at Turning It Off