Today is the 23rd of March. It’s been a few days since I’ve quit my job.

In the last month or so, I have been battling severe burnout and depression. This was not the first time that I had gotten frustrated at work, but the intensity of my disinclination towards work was very high.

Soon, there came a day when I found myself physically incapable of continuing to work. I was working from home, so avoiding work was easy.

But when my manager asked me about the status of my work, I realize I could not keep saying “I’m looking into it”.

The very next day, I talked to my manager and went on a 1-week break. That was probably one of the worst weeks of my life, mental health-wise. I had a big decision to make regarding my career, and by association, my life.

I was overthinking a lot, and having trouble reconciling with reality. You could say I was having a quarter-life crisis.

In the back of my mind, I had made the decision to quit, but I didn’t know what to do with my life after that. I’ve always wanted a lot from my life, and I was and maybe am a passionate software engineer, but I’ve never wanted that to be the only part of my identity. However, my job was well paid, I was a good employee, and apart from work, I did not have the mental energy to devote my life to more stuff.

This left me stuck in an endless cycle of wanting more from my life, but not being able to get it. All this time, I at least wanted to be good at my job, and earn good money while doing it, but now that I did not even want to do that, I was left with nothing much to look forward to.

I spent that week talking to friends and family. I’m privileged to have a few good friends who I can trust to give good advice. ( Thanks, Danish ) , and they helped bring my stress levels down.

For those few days, I was very free to do anything my heart desired. All I did was brood, sleep in the sun, and do some light reading.

After that, I booked a trip to Goa with one of my friends, and then soon I had other things to worry about other than my job.

While I was on this holiday, I told my manager that after much thinking, I want to quit. 4th March was my last working day.

Such a life-changing turmoil happened within the span of ~10 days and It’s possibly changed the course of my life.

I’ve recognized a lot of reasons that may have led me down this dark path, but we’ll discuss those another day.

What next?

I do have a few months of runway in terms of savings, and therefore me leaving my job won’t bring along financial misfortune, but dipping into my savings makes me anxious, so I’m trying to find another job. I think I’ll be happy to earn a little bit less than what I previously earned, provided the new job is not so stressful and leaves me the energy to do more stuff with my life. These are my short-term plans though. In the long term, I want to, first of all, clear out long-pending items from my to-do list and focus more on things that give me joy.

Writing

Yes, Writing is one of the things I’ve always wanted to do more of. I think I’m a good writer and writing stories about your life also helps preserve memories.
However, I’ve not published much on this blog. The major reason for that is yak-shaving. I am a front-end developer, and every few months, I get bored of the current design. I do have things that I wanna write about, but I spend my energy on redesigning and tweaking my website instead. Even this time, I had this huge mental block of redesigning my website first instead of writing this post.

Not this time though, I will keep redesigning my website to practice my design and frontend skills, but I will also post a lot more on this blog. I also won’t care much about the quality of my posts, this is my website, my home on the internet, so if this becomes a public journal, let it be.