Well, I Got Fired Again.
Or did I fire myself? Honestly, I’m still not sure.
Okay, fine, I was almost fired. But let us be honest, I got fired. And this is nothing new. I have been fired, and I have fired myself many times. This one might actually be the funniest version, because a few months ago, this exact client was begging me to stay.
Typical.
Here is what happens every time, like clockwork. My personality is big. I get really connected to people. We get used to each other, and once we are, human things start happening. They start using that closeness against me a little, and I, on my end, start covering up some of my own mistakes.
One of my biggest mistakes is coming late.
I am not going to lie to you. I am a latecomer. I have no sense of time. Even right now, writing this, it is already midday, and I was supposed to have done a lot today. Instead, I spent a whole hour just reflecting. And honestly, I wish I could just not have any sense of time at all, because I do not love working under pressure. I actually work really well under it, weirdly, but I do not enjoy the lead-up.
Anyway. I am regressing. Let me focus.
This was not sudden, even if yesterday looked sudden from the outside. There had been small things building for a while that I kept absorbing without saying anything. I had been late three times since the summer started. Three times, total, over the course of weeks. That was the number she decided to use: responding to my lateness by asking for something I had not agreed to. Extra hours. Tasks outside of what I was actually hired for. I experienced it as leverage.
Yesterday I got there late again. She was waiting for me. She said I had to stay longer, otherwise she would call the office.
And something in me just said, enough, the line must be drawn somewhere, let her call.
I did not agree this time. I did not negotiate. I had already been sitting with the decision to leave for a while without acting on it, and something about her saying it as a threat made the decision come to a head right then.
I gave my notice. She called the office anyway.
I think she just wanted to get there first.
This all happened during a full moon in Capricorn, which feels almost too on the nose. Capricorn is structure, discipline, showing up consistently, whether you feel like it or not. And if I am honest, the chaos of this exit is pointing directly at something I already knew. The kind of jobs I keep taking do not actually have the structure I need. Shifts that hold me hostage from getting fulfilling work.
Do I wake up excited to go to these jobs? No. Do I wake up excited to work on my own website, my own writing, the thing I am actually building? Every single time.
I have been told I am constantly bracing before I even walk in the door. That my body knows what is coming before my mind admits it.
The full moon was not punishing me. It was just shining a light on a structure that was already cracked, and a body that already knew it.
Here is the part I actually want to admit, because it is the funniest and the most honest.
I do this thing where I walk into a new situation and immediately decide it is amazing. Oh my God, this job is so easy. I do not have to do anything I do not like. The house is beautiful. And I really do love beauty, so a beautiful house genuinely disarms me. I will overlook almost anything if the environment is harmonious, and some of these places are amazing. There was one home surrounded by trees, and deer would just wander in and out. I only got to work in the mornings; the rest of the time, I could just be in the back yard working on my own things and being in nature. There was another one that faced the ocean. The view from that place lives rent-free in my mind when a guided meditation opens with clearing your head. I go there. Mmmh... maybe I should be house-sitting. Sorry, let me focus.
That is exactly how the fog forms. I fall in love with the good parts so fast and so completely that I stop noticing the small wrong things accumulating underneath. The beauty becomes the distraction.
Cancer season started this week, and the first teaching is about mist. Fog. Not the kind in the sky, the kind that rises from the ground right where you are standing, hiding exactly what is in front of you.
It goes like this for me, every time. Something feels off. I notice it early. I do not say anything, because saying something feels like complaining, and I have spent my whole life trying not to be someone whose grievances drain the people around her. So I hold it. I keep showing up. I tell myself it is manageable.
Then something tips it. Not even something huge. Sometimes it is a vacuum request. And the fog lifts all at once.
Not gently. Like fire.
The antidote to the fog is to name the small irritations as they happen, before they accumulate into something explosive.
Which sounds simple. Except for me, naming small irritations sounds exactly like complaining. And I really do not like to complain.
But I have been sitting with that this week, and I think I need to be more precise. I do not dislike complaining. I dislike what I believe complaining makes me become.
The belief underneath it: if I say what bothers me, I become a burden. Some people have to manage. A pattern I recognize from somewhere much older than this job, that I swore I would never repeat.
So instead, I absorb everything silently, right up until I can no longer, and then it all comes out at once, and it looks nothing like a small irritation. It looks like a woman who just quit her job and burned the bridge on the way out.
Every explosion I have ever regretted began as a sentence I never said.
There is another layer to this that I did not expect to find. When I hear other people complain about small things, even my own son, something in me wants to shut it down immediately. Redirect. See the positive side. I tell myself I am teaching resilience. But underneath that urgency is something else. Their small complaint touches the same place mine does. It feels, for half a second, like evidence that I have not done enough. So I rush to fix the feeling before I have to feel that.
And I realized something this week that stopped me: children do not only learn whether emotions are safe from how the people around them express emotion. They also learn it from how those people receive it. Every time I redirect my son, I am not just teaching him to see the positive side. I am teaching him whether his discomfort is welcome in the room.
Same fog. Both ends.
I am not going to pretend this is some deep, resolved piece. It is not. I do not have an ending where everything gets fixed.
What I do have is a mid-week correction to my own framing. I thought my issue was ~~complaining~~. It is not, really. My actual issue is what happens the moment I detect a shift in the dynamic of a relationship, which I do fast, almost always before I can explain why.
The detection is not the problem. What happens after it is.
Right now, the sequence runs something like: something feels off, which means my place is threatened, which means I either submit or burn the bridge.
That escalates from observation to identity in about half a second.
“She responded to my lateness by asking for something I had not agreed to” is a sentence about behavior. “Therefore, I am beneath her” is a sentence about worth. I have been treating them as the same sentence my entire life.
The pattern is consistent across basically every relationship I have ever had. Jobs. Friendships. I have lost friendships over this exact thing. I once lost many, all the way in Bali, Indonesia, where I essentially kicked or got kicked out of a villa, miles from home, over the same sequence.
So if anyone out there is thinking about hiring me for a job: I am wonderful, I am dedicated, I fall in love with beautiful spaces a little too easily, and I notice shifts in relationships quickly. What I am still learning is how to let the noticing stay information rather than turn into a verdict on who I am.
I have also realized I am looking for friendships where small grievances stay small. Where someone can say, “That bothered me,” without it becoming gossip, disloyalty, or a character flaw. Maybe that is what I have been trying to learn all along: not how to avoid complaining, but how to let discomfort have somewhere safe to land before it becomes resentment.
Maybe that is what this chapter is about.
Not becoming someone who never sees the shift.
Becoming someone whose worth no longer depends on what she sees.
So yes. I got fired again.
Or maybe this time, I finally stopped volunteering for jobs I had already left in my head months earlier.
The jury is still out.
When Eva is not walking out of a beautiful house because someone finally crossed the last line, she is learning the difference between what she observes and what she concludes from it. The gap is smaller than it looks. She is working on it.
She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and what it looks like to stop turning a sentence about behavior into a verdict on your value, one honest essay at a time.
If this essay moved you, share it with someone who needs it.
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Or simply stay.