Why do I get tired of my jobs so fast?
She stayed three years in a job that used her up. Every morning she walked in wanting to teach well. Every evening she left with nothing.
The pattern was always the same. Rules broken by the person above her. Policies ignored. She kept doing the work anyway, kept showing up for the students, kept being the one who cared when caring was the only thing left to give. By the time she got home there was nothing for writing, nothing for herself, nothing for the people who loved her. The fog came and stayed.
We tell ourselves if we just keep going it will get better. If we just survive this semester, this quarter, this review cycle. But survival is not neutral. It costs something every single day and we do not get to choose what it takes first.
She did not leave when it started. She left three years later, months before she could afford to. The strength it took to resign came from whatever was left after the job had taken everything else.
For weeks after, the fog lifted in pieces. She started writing again. Slowly. She went back through old projects she had abandoned. The creative part that had gone into hiding came back, but it came back different. Quieter. More careful.
The job did not make her tired. Staying in it did.
There is a point in most jobs where the cost of staying becomes higher than the cost of leaving, but we do not always know when we cross it. We think we are building endurance. What we are actually doing is spending reserves we will need later.
The tiredness is not about the work itself. It is about what the work asks us to become in order to keep doing it. We get tired of jobs fast when the job requires us to be someone we are not, or to stop being someone we are. When the gap between what we believe and what we are asked to do every day becomes something we have to step over on the way in.
She stayed because she thought leaving would be harder. Leaving was hard. Staying was harder in a way that did not show up on a balance sheet.
The part we do not talk about enough is what comes after. The months where the creative part is still in hiding. Where standing up for yourself feels like learning to walk again. Where you have to take baby steps back to believing you were right to leave.
Sit with this:
What part of you has gone into hiding while you survive the day?
What would it cost you to stay another year?
If the fog lifted tomorrow, what would you go back to first?