There is a version of you still running.

You may not see her right away. She doesn’t announce herself. She shows up as restlessness on a quiet afternoon, as guilt when the calendar is empty, as the reflexive reach for something productive when nothing is required of you. She is the one who learned, over decades, that her worth lived in her output. She is very good at her job.

I know her well. I spent almost 40 years building her.

She navigated federal agencies, led teams, held missions together with both hands. She showed up before anyone asked and stayed after everyone left. She learned to read a room, manage up, absorb pressure without flinching, and serve with integrity even when integrity wasn’t returned. She was remarkable, honestly. And she carried me — carried us — further than I ever planned when this all began.

But she doesn’t know how to stop. And I’ve been wondering if anyone ever told her she could.

What Is Happening Out There

If something in those words landed close to home, you are not alone — and you are not broken.

In 2025, more than 260,000 federal employees left government service through deferred resignations, early retirement incentives, reductions in force, and what many experienced not as a choice but as a slow push toward a door they hadn’t planned to walk through yet. More than 54,000 retirement applications are still pending at the Office of Personnel Management — more than four times the typical level — with some employees waiting six to nine months for their first annuity payment, some facing foreclosure, some losing health benefits in the process. Federal News Network

The paperwork is delayed. The pension hasn’t arrived. And in the middle of all of that practical uncertainty, something quieter and harder to name is also happening.

People who gave decades to public service as a calling — not just a career — are sitting in unfamiliar stillness, trying to figure out who they are without the thing that told them every morning who they were.

Jacob Cross, a former analyst at NOAA, described his final months this way: his program office went into survival mode, with every bit of energy directed toward keeping the mission alive rather than moving it forward. Federal News Network That is not a soft exit. That is a rupture. And ruptures leave marks, even when we are too busy managing them to notice.

And it isn’t only federal workers. People across industries, across generations, across every kind of career are arriving at this same unexpected shore — some by choice, some by circumstance, many of them holding the same quiet question: who am I when the work is done?

What the System Taught Us

Before we can answer that question honestly, I think we have to look at something most transition conversations skip over entirely.

The system got to us long before the exit did.

It started with grades. A letter, a number, a teacher’s red pen telling you whether you were enough that semester. Then it moved to GPAs, class rank, which college accepted you and which didn’t. Then performance reviews — and here is where it gets almost laughable in hindsight — a number. Often just 1 to 5. A single digit, assigned by another human being with their own fears and blind spots and bad days, meant to represent the entirety of your professional worth for an entire year.

We accepted this. Most of us accepted it completely. Because the system is very good at conditioning you to believe the number is the truth.

I want to tell you something that happened to me.

I was serving as Deputy Director of an office, reporting to a man whose insecurities announced themselves on day one. Literally day one. He looked at my credentials and said, with genuine unease, that I was probably more qualified for the position and asked if that was going to be a problem. I remember thinking — oh, this is going to be a journey. And I smiled, because what else do you do when someone has just told you exactly who they are before you’ve had a chance to say “Good Morning”.

I chose to serve him with my whole heart as I had always done to support my leadership. That’s what my mentors had always taught me — help your boss get the A. Make the office shine. So I did what I could within my power to support him and our team. I worked toward his greatness even as the micro aggressions accumulated, even as I felt the gap widening between his version of me and my actual self. I kept hoping he would rise above it. People sometimes do.

He didn’t.

When my performance review came, we were alone in the conference room. So many people waiting to see what would happen. The writing was on the wall. He gave me a rating below what my record clearly demonstrated. And then he did something I still find almost incomprehensible in its smallness: he laughed. He told me it wouldn’t ruin my reputation in that snarky way that you know the intention was to do just that. And then he encouraged me to beg him to change it. Now I’m laughing as I write this but I was totally shocked at the time because that meant he knew he was wrong.

I want to pause there and just let that land. A grown man. A director. Laughing. Waiting for a woman he felt threatened by to beg.

What he didn’t know — what I had not told him — was that another office, one that had watched how I worked and how I was being treated, had already extended me a job offer. They had seen me clearly. And they were waiting patiently while I made my decision based on one simple thing: whether I would be respected or disrespected in that review room.

He made my decision very easy.

But here is the part I’m still going back for. In that moment, before the clarity came, before the composure held — I was heartbroken. Not because of him. He had shown me his character from the beginning. I was heartbroken because I had believed, somewhere underneath everything, that the number meant something. That a 1-to-5 scale held something real about who I was. That a man with a bruised ego and a form from human resources had been handed actual power over my worth.

The system had taught me that since my first report card. And with all my education, all my accomplishments, all my knowing better — I had believed it long enough to feel it.

That is the part of me I had to “Step Behind”, observe, and release.

The Absurdity We Agreed To

Looking back, I find it almost funny. Not the cruelty of it — that’s not funny. But the architecture. The whole elaborate structure we built to measure human beings. The ratings and the rankings, the titles and the tiers, the size of your house and the brand of your car and what your children accomplish and where they go to school.

We were born into these systems. We didn’t design them. But somewhere along the way, most of us stopped questioning them and started performing for them. Stopped asking is this true and started asking how do I score well.

And then one day the system, hopefully, releases you — or you release it, or some combination of both — and you are standing in your kitchen on a Wednesday morning with nowhere to be, and the silence is so unfamiliar it feels almost accusatory.

I will be honest with you. I found myself wondering — is this how wealthy people live? Just… brunch? Shopping on a Tuesday? A long lunch with a friend for no reason other than the pleasure of it? I genuinely did not know what to do with the strange guilt I sometimes felt from unstructured time that carried no deliverable at the end of it. I had spent so long earning my rest that I didn’t know how to simply take it.

There are people in this world, I realized, who have never had to justify a slow morning. Who did not grow up believing that productivity was the price of belonging. I was getting my first real taste of that freedom. And it felt equal parts luxurious and deeply, quietly strange, like maybe there was something I was supposed to be doing that I forgot.

Breaking the Real Glass Ceiling

This is where I want to offer something different from the usual transition conversation.

We are told to move forward. Pivot. Reinvent. Build the next chapter. And all of that has its place, eventually. But I think something has to happen first — something that looks less like forward motion and more like turning around.

One step behind. Back to find her.

Not the accomplished one with the exit strategy. Further back than that. The one who sat across from a man who laughed at her and felt it anyway. The one who got her first B and wondered what it meant about her. The one who learned, so young and so thoroughly, that worth was something you proved rather than something you simply were.

Sociologist Helen Rose Ebaugh spent years studying what happens when people leave defining roles. She found that role exit moves through four stages — doubt, exploring alternatives, a turning point, and finally building what she called the “ex-role” — a self that carries the old identity without being trapped inside it. Academia.edu Most people, she found, try to rush to the new identity without releasing the old one. They leave the role. But they bring her with them, still running, still proving, still measuring the day by what got done.

Research consistently shows that without the external markers of achievement, some people in this transition struggle with self-worth, reporting feelings of purposelessness or invisibility — and this is strongly associated with higher risks of anxiety and depression in the years immediately following departure, particularly for those whose identity was tightly bound to their work. Kevinwgrant

This is not weakness. This is what happens when the system that defined your worth for thirty years simply stops sending signals. The silence isn’t emptiness. It’s the first real quiet you’ve had in decades. And she doesn’t know what to do in it yet.

Making peace with the self who carried you here is the work of this season. Before the next chapter. Before the reinvention. Before any of it.

She needs to hear, from you, that the number was never the truth. That the rating didn’t hold her. That the title was just a door she walked through, not the sum of what she was. That she gave her best to systems that were never designed to fully see her — and she did it with grace, and it mattered, and she can put it down now.

What’s Actually on the Other Side

I want to tell you what I’ve been finding, on the other side of all that running.

Lunch with my mom and sister on a random Thursday, unhurried, with nowhere to be after. Coffee on the patio while the morning does whatever it wants to do. The quiet satisfaction of fixing something around the house myself, figuring it out with my own hands instead of scheduling someone else to handle it, rare, but it does happen. A book read in the middle of the afternoon, not as a reward for finishing something, but just because I wanted to. A painting, growing something in the garden, a meal made slowly, beautifully for my grown kids, not because they can’t cook, but just the pleasure of serving my family.

These things sound small. They are not small. They are what was always on the other side of the striving — the life that the striving was supposedly in service of. And most of us spent so long striving that we forgot to notice we had arrived somewhere.

Wherever you are today is not a mark of your worth. It is not a performance review. It is not a number on a scale designed by people who didn’t fully see you (as a past manager I am also guilty). It is a moment in a life that has always been more than the systems built around it.

You have value here. You have passion here. You have the right to rest here — not as recovery from something, not as preparation for what comes next, but simply as a human being who has carried a great deal for a very long time and has earned, more than most, the right to set it down.

Striving has its place. It also has places it doesn’t belong. And learning to tell the difference — learning to feel where one ends and the other begins — that might be the most important work you do in this season.

Not because it makes you more productive. But because it makes you more you.

One Step Behind, Then Forward

I am still learning this. Some mornings I wake up with the list already forming, the familiar pressure of not-yet-enough arriving before the coffee is ready. And instead of fighting it or surrendering to it, I am learning to do something else.

I turn around. I go back one step. I find her — the one still running, the one who believed the number, the one who sat in that review room and felt the system’s hands around her worth — and I sit down beside her.

I don’t tell her she was wrong to believe it. The system was very convincing. I just tell her the truth: that she was always more than what any of it measured. That she carried us beautifully. That she can rest now.

And then, slowly, together, we walk forward.

Not toward a deliverable. Not toward a rating or a title or any new proof of worth.

Just toward the morning. The coffee. The patio. Whatever unhurried, ungraded, gloriously ordinary thing is waiting there.

She’s never had that before.

It’s time.

Gardenia Group offers coaching and a supportive space for people navigating life’s most significant transitions — on your terms, in your time. Visit gardenialove.org to learn more.