How do you know it's time to quit?

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A friend recently shared with me his story of rage-quitting a small startup. Although there had been warning signs even before he joined the company, he had been reassured that he was going to be able to treat this job like a job (that ends after a reasonable amount of hours each day), and not like his whole life. Bit by bit, though, the expectations he was promised started to look a little different once the company stopped “selling” him on taking the role and started to settle into their normal way of working. Luckily my friend has excellent boundaries and wasn’t swayed by their demand for more time, but the people he worked for started to distrust his work, his work ethic, and his communication. All because he refused to treat this job like anything more than a job.

Let me tell you a little more about my friend. He is excellent at his trade. I know that firsthand because I worked with him. Not only did I work with him, I found ways of working with him even when I wasn’t supposed to work with him. He excels at what he does. He’s also a direct communicator. Like an actual one. A lot of people say that they are, only to be incredibly passive-aggressive (usually for deeply understandable reasons we can’t begin to know until we do some work… hint… therapy…). My friend? Naturally direct.

Despite his past success, his talent, his clear boundaries, and his communication style, my friend was starting to really struggle in this work environment. He was deeply unhappy and frustrated, so much so that he was thinking about leaving, but something stopped him from just doing it. One day after work, he relayed to his partner that day’s nonsense, and she reflected back to him what she just heard (and how bad it actually sounded). She suggested that perhaps he should finally quit. He quit the next day.

Now, this is not a story about listening to your partner; it is a story that illuminates how incredibly valuable it is to have another person reflect back to you what you already see and know. We humans are social creatures, and in isolation (in any of its many forms) we begin to question our gut, our innate sense of knowing. We actually need other people to help triangulate our experiences, and we need other people to mirror ourselves back to us. What we can’t recognize from the inside, we can often recognize on the outside. We need to hear other people name what’s happening so that we can affirm our own sense of reality. (This is why gaslighting is so damaging… but that’s a topic for a different day.)

If you are lucky enough to have a partner who can mirror back to you, where what your partner is saying matches up with what your gut has been trying to tell you all along, that is amazing! But you don’t need a partner to be able to have this kind of mirroring. Perhaps your best friend—the one you can call up in tears with existential doubt but somehow they have you laughing and remembering who you are in 15 minutes flat—is the person who can reflect back to you. Perhaps it’s a sibling, a parent, or a close family member. Maybe it’s a random stranger you meet at 5 am after spending the night stuck in the airport. And maybe it’s your therapist.

One last note here:

We live in a capitalist society. I fully realize that many, if not most, people are not financially in a position to leave their jobs at the drop of a hat. If you are in a really damaging, toxic-to-your-health situation, at least crunch the numbers before dismissing it out of hand (sometimes what we think we can live on and what we can actually live on are different things). If it is really not possible to leave, then you may need to look for another job before leaving your existing one. In that case, I highly highly recommend you have a source of emotional support in that in-between time, and that may not be the person you identify as your partner. While you definitely should expect some amount of understanding and support from your person, solely relying on your person for as much mirroring and being-with as you probably need is not only unfair to them but possibly damaging to their well-being. Call on your communities and let them know you need a little extra support, seek out therapy, or both.