The Pause

I departed my last role on my own terms. I haven’t started a new one yet. The gap — a few weeks old, still widening — has taken a shape I didn’t expect.

The first thing that happened when I stopped was the fear. Not fear of the future in a concrete sense. It’s quieter and more corrosive than that. It’s the fear that if I am not producing, I do not exist. That my value is entirely transactional and the moment I stepped off the treadmill, the treadmill would continue without me, and no one would notice the gap where I used to be.

This fear is not irrational. It is, in many ways, a reasonable inference from the environments I have trained and worked in. The military runs on output. Business run on output. We are selected, promoted, and retained on the basis of what we deliver, and we internalize that logic. It becomes part of our identity, deeply entangled with our sense of worth.

The pause forces a reckoning with that.

When you remove the output, what remains? For me the honest answer is: discomfort. I would describe it as a restlessness that presents as productivity guilt, but is actually something harder to name. The suspicion that without a mission, you might not be the person you thought you were.

I don’t believe that ambition is disordered, or that the drive to build and contribute is wrong. I’ve spent my career in rooms full of people who want to do consequential things, where drive is real and the work matters. All of that is important to me and it’s exactly where I want to return.

The pause is not exactly a vacation. I’ve found it to be, at its best, an act of reflection. A question asked in conditions where the usual answers aren’t available. Who are you when no one is measuring you? What do you actually want… separate from what you’ve been optimized to want?

I still wake up with the pressure of undefined urgency and a sense that I am behind on something. I’ve started to think of that feeling as useful data rather than a command to obey. It tells me something about how I’m wired, but it does not tell me what to do next.

What I’m beginning to believe is that this pause is not the interruption of the work, but part of the work. If done right, I’ll return with clarity. I’m fighting the temptation to fill the silence with noise, or to call the first opportunity that appeared a calling.

I want to acknowledge this pause is a privilege. Not everyone can stop. I am fortunate that I could and I did. In hindsight, I’ll also admit I should have done this a long time ago. I left the Marine Corps and went straight into my next role without so much as a breath between.

I don’t regret it. We are all, in every season of our lives, doing something for the first time, and the best we can do is pay attention while it’s happening and be honest about what we find.

Honestly, I don’t know how to wrap this reflection up. I’m still in the middle of it. And that’s okay. :)