Wrote this yesterday because writing usually makes more sense than speaking for me 🤣 If any of it resonates, feel free to comment — and if you want to laugh at me, please do, because I’m usually already doing that myself.

TODAY’S FILE

Or:

How I Quit My Job, Learned Things, and Accidentally Started Suspecting I Might Actually Know What I’m Doing

I quit my job today.

No dramatic exit.

No storming out.

No slow-motion walk carrying a mug, a plant and unresolved rage.

Just a very ordinary moment where something internally went:

Right.

That’s enough now.

Not because this appeared out of nowhere.

Because this has been building for months, and eventually there comes a point where you realise if you do not move now, you will still be having the exact same argument with yourself six months from now.

For context:

Life recently has looked like this:

• work

• children

• systems

• forms

• deadlines

• emails

• repeated attempts to remember why I opened the laptop in the first place

• approximately 247 tabs open internally

• one definitely playing music I cannot find

• several frozen

• at least twelve demanding immediate attention for reasons still unknown

So outwardly:

normal adult functioning.

Internally:

still largely winging life and occasionally producing evidence of that without warning.

Then somewhere in the middle of all that, I started writing properly.

Not because I had a plan.

Because certain things I had noticed and questioned for a while finally stopped sitting quietly and started needing somewhere to go.

Which became writing.

Which became a framework.

Which then did something I had not fully factored in:

A highly respected person whose thinking I genuinely admire is taking it seriously.

Meeting with me.

Giving it time.

Treating my thinking like it deserves proper thought.

Which is a shock in itself.

Then, not long after, another respected voice — already quietly reading things I had written elsewhere — stepped in too.

Which is roughly where my internal response became:

I’m sorry, what?

No, actually —

Wait… what the fuck is going on here?

Not that my brain accepted any of this gracefully.

Obviously not.

It immediately split itself in two:

CHANNEL ONE:

This might actually be something.

CHANNEL TWO:

Calm down, Ruth. You once put foil in the microwave.

Both continue to exist with equal confidence, which feels deeply unhelpful.

A lot of what I have spent years assuming was me being too much appears to be exactly what has been doing the work all along.

• noticing tone quickly

• spotting shifts early

• hearing what is missing as much as what is said

• joining patterns before other people have finished the sentence

• clocking inconsistencies before I have consciously worked out why they are bothering me

For a long time that mostly just made me feel intense.

Or difficult.

Or like I should arrive with my own warning label attached somewhere visible.

Turns out some of it was not random noise.

It was information.

Which would have been useful to know sooner.

Because I did not hate where I was.

There were good people.

There was purpose in parts.

There was routine.

There was familiarity.

But underneath all of it there was always the same quiet thought:

This cannot be all my brain is for.

Not in an arrogant way.

Just in a very persistent, hard-to-ignore way.

So now here we are:

• framework written months ago

• meetings had

• documents handed over

• serious conversations happening

• unexpected offers of help

• me still fully capable of putting ordinary things in completely ridiculous places

FINAL NOTE

I am 43.

I have quit my job.

I am skint.

The meetings happened.

The conversations were real.

And now, like any properly functioning ADHD brain, I am doing the obvious next step:

replaying every word, wondering if I sounded intelligent or completely ridiculous, or if I had hallucinated most of it or nodded through something I should probably have questioned further.

Because even when you work for something, build it, and watch serious people take it seriously, part of your brain still immediately asks:

Yes, but did you definitely not say anything weird halfway through?

Quitting my job feels financially reckless.

The rest of it feels slightly surreal.

And still somehow, here we are.

Which is frankly more progress than I expected for a Monday.

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