The end of endurance.
I used to think this city, this job, this life was going to be my forever.
Instead, it became one of the hardest chapters of my life.
I’ve spent nights working myself to exhaustion, only to be made to feel invisible. I’ve cried in office washrooms, questioned my worth, watched toxic people weaponize power, and slowly realized how easy it is for workplaces to drain the soul out of someone while calling it “professionalism” and “resilience.”
And the saddest part? Young people enter these systems believing this is normal. That being overworked, humiliated, emotionally exhausted and constantly anxious is somehow the price of success.
It isn’t.
Pain changes you. But sometimes, it also clarifies you.
This experience taught me exactly what I do NOT want anymore: I do not want a life where work consumes my health, my peace, my relationships, my joy, or my future. I do not want to spend the last years of my 20s surviving instead of living. I do not want to become so used to toxicity that I mistake it for ambition.
I miss home. I miss my family. I miss my people. I miss the version of myself that had energy, softness, laughter, and hope.
So I’m choosing myself.
I’m leaving behind environments that made me feel small and returning to the people and places that make me feel alive again.
And no, walking away is not failure. Staying somewhere that is slowly destroying you is.
One month and five days left.
Then I go home.
And when I come back into the world again, I’ll come back stronger, wiser, happier, and far more myself than I’ve been in a very long time.
My comeback will be bigger than every setback that tried to break me.
Mark my words.