I Did Everything Right...So Why Was I Still Unhappy?

Speaker A: M. Welcome to Suits and Pajamas, where grace meets grit and ambition learns how to breathe. Hi everyone and welcome back to Suits and Pajamas, the the podcast where we talk about how we combine mix the duality of ourselves and how we navigate living life today. I want to start today by saying, like, I've spent a long time being the person who had it together, or at least I was performing that version convincingly enough that nobody ever asked too many questions when. And so this podcast is me stopping that. I'm not perfect, but every episode I really want to focus on bringing you real situations, something I've actually lived or witnessed. And I'm going to give you both sides of it. The suit side, the polished version, the answer that looks good, the perspective the professional world rewards. And then I'm also going to share the pajama side, what it actually felt like at 2am, what m I didn't say out loud, the truth beneath the composure. And then I'm going to start telling you how or what I actually believe after living through it. No sugar coating, no bow on top. Because what I realized over the last year be curating this podcast, I was still not being completely bold in what I had to say. And I think that's because of my conditioning of what the suit side of me always felt was the right thing to say versus the pajama side, the human side, the side that you all deserve to really hear unfettered. What I have to say in the suit version is not an indictment on anyone, any company or anything else. But it is something that I just. I just need to lean into that duality in a more bold way. That's really the way I want to say that. So I call this podcast Suits and Pajamas. And so because most of us are performing one and living the other, and also I just think it's time to just say that thing out loud. And so I just want to say that I'm glad that you're here. So, uh, go grab your coffee, tea, or whatever libation suits your fancy because from this day forward, we're going to get really, really real. And so today's episode, I want to talk about how we do everything right. Then why are we still unhappy? And so I want to start today in a parking lot. Not a metaphorical one, a, uh, real parking lot. I had just worked my last day at a job. I had given my two week notice and I had done it all the right way. I stayed professional. I showed up every single day for those 14 days and I did my job. And now it was over. And as I was sitting in that parking lot, uh, all I could think of was I did not have anything lined up. No offer letter in my inbox. No real safety net. Just the decision I had made. And in that parking lot, I sat there, just completely overwhelmed. Now, I had given this company three plus years. Three plus years of absorbing things that I shouldn't have absorbed. I tolerated things I shouldn't have tolerated. And I convinced myself that this, this was just what professional life looked like. Until I couldn't convince myself anymore. Until it started costing me things that I really couldn't afford to lose. My peace, my sense of self, my mental health. And I made a decision. I would rather roll the dice on finding something else than to stay somewhere I knew was slowly breaking me. I didn't know what was on the other side. I just knew I couldn't do this anymore. And for the first time, that felt like enough of a reason. And, uh, I want to be completely transparent here. The thing that scared me the most, the thing that I didn't say out loud to anyone, not even to my husband, who was standing in our kitchen looking at me like I had just done the most obvious correct thing in the world. It was this. If I fail at this, he will never see me the same again. Not because he's that kind of man. He's not. He has never once made me feel like his belief in me was conditional. Ever. Which is exactly why this was so terrifying. Because he was so sure. And I was so not. Today's episode is about that gap. That gap between the version of success that looks right on paper and the version of success that's right for your actual life. And what happens when the only way forward requires you to blow up that map entirely. Again. This is suits and pajamas. And so let me tell you what doing everything right looked like for me. I had built a career the way you're supposed to build one. I showed up, I performed, I climbed. I wore the right things and said the right things and stayed late enough that nobody could question my commitment. I was a woman in a professional environment trying to take up exactly the right amount of space. Not too much, not too, uh, little, which is its own exhausting full time job that nobody ever puts on an org chart. And the job I eventually walked away from at that stage of my career. It checked every box on the outside. Title, salary, stability, a resume line that sounded impressive at dinner parties. I was proud. But what it didn't have, leadership that deserved my best work. A culture that was honest about what? It was a version of me at 8pm that I recognized from 8am and so I want to be careful here, because I'm not here to air grievances. That's not what this is about. What I will say is this. The toxicity I experienced was layered. Yes, it really was a specific two people, one person especially, but it really came down to two people. But it was also the wrong culture. It was. It was one that was performative and political in ways that rewarded the wrong things. And underneath all of it, underneath all of this, I realized I had outgrown it. And I stayed anyway because leaving felt like a failure, and I didn't know what else it could be. And so here's the part of my story that I almost didn't tell, because it's the part that makes me look less like a strong woman making a brave decision and more like a person who was genuinely scared. But I realized, um, I'm not the only one out here who gets scared. And I don't need to shoulder or put forward this facade of being perfect and having all the answers. So, as I said earlier, my husband supported me completely. When I told him, like, I was done with this company, he didn't flinch. Not at all. And I don't know exactly what he said, but he said something like, good, you don't owe them anything. And I know you'll find something like, he's just so Team Twana. That's just his nature and his default. He's going to always back my play. But I remember the feeling of standing there, and I was thinking, will I though? I don't know, it just felt like, will my decision impact our stability, our financial stability? I didn't know. And so his confidence in me, it didn't feel like a net. It felt more like a bar that I now had to clear. He wasn't adding pressure intentionally, not at all. But he was just certain. And his certainty revealed how uncertain I actually was. I, um, couldn't fall apart in front of him again. I'm the strong one. And falling apart would mean betraying that version of me that he believed in. So I took a deep breath, I smiled, and then I went. And I had a very private, very unglamorous breakdown in the car as I went to go get groceries. So that's the scene. That's the real situation. Not the brave one, the real one. Okay, let's do the suits side of this. And I want to be honest, I'm not going to straw man this, because the Suit side of this argument is real. It has weight. And for a long time, a long time, I believed it completely. Every career mentor that I ever had said some version of the same thing, right? You never quit without something else being lined up. You just don't. Because your leverage is highest when you're employed. Your options are widest when you're not desperate, and desperation makes you take the wrong next thing. That's not fear talking that strategy. And you know they're not wrong. There is data behind this. Recruiters will tell you, some of them openly, that there's a subtle disadvantage to being the candidate who just left. The questions come, why did you leave? What happened? Is there something we're not seeing? It's unfair. It's absolutely unfair. But it does exist. And the suits argument says your worth is most legible when you're already chosen. And the world unfortunately has a way of agreeing. Here's where it gets interesting to me. Brene Brown, who many of you know, and if you don't, she's the researcher who became a cultural phenomenon by studying vulnerability, shaming, shame and courage. She walked away from a tenured academic path to pursue research that her institution considered unserious, soft, not rigorous enough for real scholarship. She's talked about that transition, the isolation of it, the professional risk, the very real possibility that she was wrong and everyone who doubted her was right. Now, the suit side of Brene's story is simple. She should have stayed. Tenor is everything in academia. You don't walk away from tenor. You especially don't walk away from tenor to study something people think is soft science. And if you had told her in that moment of leaving that she would eventually sell millions, millions of books and give one of the most watched TED talks in history, she probably would not have believed you, because that's not how it feels when you're in the parking lot. And look, we're not alone in this story. People who sat in that parking lot, right? Between 2021 and 2022, over 47 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics documented it. Journalists called it the Great Resignation. And women led that exodus. The suits world had a word for these women. Impulsive, emotional, not thinking it through. But here's what that follow up data showed. A significant number of those who left, particularly women, reported higher job satisfaction, better pay, and improved well being within 12 to 18 months. So was it impulsive or was it a different kind of strategy, One that didn't come with a PowerPoint, but came from something else, something deeper than a five year plan. Now, let's take off the blazer. Here's what the pajamas version of the story sounds like. The version I wasn't saying out loud. The version that lived in the car and in the 2:00am um, ceiling staring. And in the specific way I'd exhale. I'm still exhaling clearly. When I finally pulled out from that parking lot that evening, I wasn't leaving without a plan because I was reckless. I was leaving without a plan because I had finally admitted that the plan I had was killing something in me. Slowly enough that I kept convincing myself it was fine. There's a version of doing everything right that is actually just chronic self abandonment with a good LinkedIn profile. And I had been living that version for all of those three plus years. And so I want to talk about the. The fear beneath the fear. It's the best way I can say it. Not the financial fear, though, that was real. Don't misunderstand me. I want to talk about the deeper one. The fear that if I failed at this, my husband could lose faith in me. And the version he married, the capable, grounded person who figures things out, would be revealed as a front, that I would be exposed as someone who made a dramatic choice and I couldn't back it up. And I want you to notice what the fear is actually about. It's not about failing. It's about being seen failing by someone whose opinion of me I had built part of my identity around. That is a very different thing, though, and it's worth naming, because how many decisions are we making or not making based not on the actual risk, but on the fear of being witnessed in the uncertainty. And that's what I was confronting. And so the pajama side of this also has to reckon with what staying, well, what staying had been costing me in that role. And I think this is the part that we skip over when we talk about leaving without a plan. We calculate the risk of leaving. We rarely calculate the risk of staying. And for me, the cost of staying was that I had started to believe the version of me that that job reflected. Small, managed, tolerated, rather than valued. And the longer I stayed, the more that version started to feel true. At some point, staying stopped being the safe choice and staying became the gamble. And I had waited too long to see that. Here's what I actually believe after having lived through it, after the dominoes fell. Because the dominoes had to fall, no doubt, every single one of them, they had to fall. The leaving without a plan, the terror, the private breakdown in the grocery store parking lot. The mornings where I smiled at my husband, then went and questioned every single choice I had ever made. The waiting, the uncertainty. The job that came eventually ended up being the best job ever. It was. It was just really clear to me that if I had stayed in that uncomfortable, miserable place, I would have missed out on something great. And it all had to happen in that order in order for me to achieve the next thing that I was really excited and destined for. And so here's the part I don't say enough. I didn't know that then. And I want to be honest about that. Because when people tell their version of this story, they often tell it from the destination. They like it. Well, they tell it like they trusted the process, like they knew what the outcome was going to be. I'm just being honest with you. I didn't know what the outcome was going to be. I was truly afraid. I was performing confidence for someone I loved because I didn't know what else to do with his certainty. And I was doing it while quietly wondering if the bravest thing I had ever done was also the stupidest thing I had ever done. And it didn't help that at that time in my life, I was a people pleaser. And I share that in my book. That's coming out soon. So here's what I want to say to you, whoever you are and wherever you are in this journey. The map you were given was built by someone who is not you. That suit version may not be yours. You have a different tailor. You have a different body type with a destination that they chose. You cannot measure yourself against that with a definition of success that fit their life, their fears. That's not your version. And you are allowed to draw a new one. Map out something different. Not because leaving is always right. It's not always right. Sometimes the suit's answer is exactly correct. Sometimes the plan matters and the bridge matters and the stability matters. All you have to do is look at the times that we live in right now. And depending on where you are in your career. Yeah, now's not the time. But sometimes. Sometimes, um. The thing keeping you in place isn't wisdom. It's the fear of losing yourself in a toxic situation or the fear of being caught not knowing something you were supposed to know, which is you deserve better. You deserve to be valued. You deserve to take that risk. And if fear is what's holding you. Just that. I want you to hear this. The people who love you correctly will not love you less for being human. In front of them. And I learned that. And so one of the things I actually want to talk about, that's one of my biggest challenges in life, I have to be honest with you. And it's how this strong woman identity gets built. Because when you're built. When you build this version of yourself that you are a strong woman, it doesn't all happen at once, right? It's. It's not a choice that you make on a Tuesday. It's something that accumulates over time. And so for me, it came from all directions at once. Some of it was survival. There were seasons in my life where strength wasn't a personality trait, it was a requirement. Some of it was expectation from family, from culture, from the environments that I was navigating. And some of it I genuinely earned. I did some really hard things in life. I showed up when I didn't have to. I held things together when things wanted to fall apart. And somewhere in there, strong stopped being something I did. And. And it became something that I was. And that's the person my husband met. And the thing is, once, uh, it's something that you are, once it's the thing that people know you as, rely on you for, you stop being able to put it down even when you need to. And so on the outside, the strong version, woman of me looked like this. Never let people see me struggle. I could be falling apart on the inside and still show up like, I had everything handled. I had practiced that performance for so long that it actually stopped feeling like a performance. Being the one everyone leaned on at work, at home, in my inner circle, I was the person people called the one with the answer or the plan, or at a minimum, the steady presence when everything else seemed uncertain. And so performing competence on empty is where I found myself. I was performing at this job, and I was exhausted. And it's the specific kind of exhausting that comes from executing at a high level when you have nothing left in the tank. And I did it consistently because I didn't know what the alternative looked like. And so I was keeping it moving no matter what. Crisis at work, keep it moving. Family situation, keep it moving. Something quietly was breaking inside of me. And so when I made that decision to leave that job, I just knew that something had to change. And I think that was part of that dynamic of not wanting my husband to see me as less than being that strong, competent, capable person that I had always presented. And truly, uh, frankly, actually, even within my own family, that's kind of the role that I play as well. And so when I was contemplating whether or not I wanted to take that leap or not and just leave that toxic job, what really helped to cement that decision was I also didn't like the version of who I was at home. I was not leaving that work at work. And I saw that it was taking its toll on me at home. I was exhausted. I wasn't going to the gym like I used to. I was just in the cycle of work, work, work. And yeah, then the me time that I did get was wrapped in guilt because every hour I took for myself was an hour I wasn't giving to someone else. And so that mental math was just never balanced. Someone always needed more than I had to give. And here's what I want you to walk away with today. The leap you're afraid to take, the one you keep talking yourself out of because you don't have the plan yet, because someone you love believes in you so completely that failing them feels unbearable. That leap might be the most honest thing you ever do for yourself. You don't have to have the answers before you move. You just have to trust that you are worth the risk. And you are. You always were. Uh, until next time. Have a great day. And the rest of the week. Sam? Mhm.