The longer version

On cognitive load, somatic release, and why a vacation was never going to be enough.

My husband said something about time hurtling at breakneck speed this week. It's a conversation with well-worn paths for us. But it made me realize I don't feel that right now. 

My time is slowing down. Actually slowing. Like I had been sprinting on a treadmill for years and forgot I was even moving and then someone finally cut the power, and my legs were still moving. And then they weren't.

What followed was strange. My diaphragm let go with a snap and I relaxed. Not the way you relax when you take a deep breath before a hard conversation. Not blissful breathing during meditation. Something sharper. You know the feeling when you've been sitting on your foot too long and you finally stand up? That hot-cold tingle, pins and needles, the blood rushing back in? It was like that, but inside. And then I started coughing, which is apparently what happens when a muscle you forgot you had suddenly remembers how to move. I relaxed, you guys!

I think I had been holding that for thirty years. But there was never the space to finally let out that last breath.

Less than a full minute later I knew the answer to the questions I got when I said I was doing this.  "Why not take a vacation? Why not take a long weekend, or a mental health day, or even a month of paid leave?" Letting go — the actual, somatic, full-body kind — is not something that can be done in a container. It requires open-endedness. It requires the definition-resistent, full valley girl "I dunno" in response to any question about plans or direction or identity.

It's the cognitive load of it all, and I think it's particularly invisible to people who haven't been in leadership or management roles, been parents or caregivers, been the one responsible for holding up systems. For some, a good day has a shape. You close tickets. You ship things. You finish a checklist. You produce a widget. There's a clear signal that says: you did it. You can put it down.

Leadership doesn't work that way. You don't keep a checklist in your head. You hold, in active memory, everything that's in flight: what product is building, what sales is promising, what your team's internal conflicts are, what features are breaking, what the new deck says, what the CEO is worried about. You're not doing these things. You're tracking them (and their movement), so you can retrieve them when they become relevant, which is always. Caregiving is all that in parallel. Plus some.

That retrieval obligation doesn't pause when you take a vacation. The relationships are still live. The team still exists. The problems are still yours — or they feel that way, which is functionally the same thing because neurons aren't always super discerning. Your nervous system doesn't know the difference between "responsible for this" and "on PTO but still technically responsible for this." It just keeps the tabs open, playing music, ready to click.

The only thing that severed that for me was leaving. Completely. No-return-date leaving. With actual rules of restriction.

The moment I stopped being the person responsible for what happens in a workplace with no shape of one to come, something changed. I saw my replacement talking about a software I had implemented. She doesn't like it. And I felt... nothing. Not defensiveness, not attachment. It's not my software. It's not my team. It's not mine. And that was the first time in years I could say that cleanly.

I want to say something directly to people who are neurodivergent and have spent years in environments that require masking: the load is heavier for us. Holding and tracking complex, shifting states while also performing neurotypical fluency — reading the room, translating yourself in real time, suppressing the way you actually think — is two jobs simultaneously. There's a formula about energy and entropy and well, it doesn't matter. You know it better than an equation can contain.

A lot of people told me I would appreciate this. I was skeptical from the ledge of a $150,000 paycheck, which is a real ledge, and I'm not pretending otherwise. Money is real. Financial fear is real. I've been poor before, and that knowledge lives in the body the way all old fear does.

But they were right. Unequivocally. There is no amount of money, from where I'm standing right now, that would make it not worth doing this. My attempts at managing my burnout were preventing me from seeing myself. Employment was starting to feel like a real trap, with real physical repercussions.

Maybe your version looks different. Maybe you have the kind of job where the load actually does pause at 5pm. But if you're a leader, and you're tired in that particular bone-deep way, and you've been telling yourself that a vacation will fix it — I'd ask you to consider whether the space of a vacation is enough to put down all the buckets you're carrying.

What I know for myself is that if this is just Week 3, I am genuinely excited to see what Month 3 looks like. Don't worry, I'll keep this article up as a "aww, wasn't that cute" reminder of the journey.