The Year I Paused to Move Forward

2025 didn’t begin with fireworks.

It began with a quiet weight I’d been carrying for a while — the kind that doesn’t look dramatic from the outside, but slowly changes the texture of everything on the inside.

On paper, I was still okay. I could function. I could deliver. I could smile in meetings, say the right things, and keep moving. If you looked at my calendar or my output, you probably wouldn’t have guessed anything was wrong.

But something in me wasn’t.

Not loud enough to justify stopping. Not obvious enough to point at. Just persistent enough to make one truth impossible to ignore: this can’t be the way I live.

So I stepped into 2025 with a simple intention.

• Not “work harder.”

• Not “push through.”

• Not “optimize my life around the problem.”

Just… change.

When “fine” stopped being enough

When your mental health starts bending under pressure, it rarely shows up as a clean, undeniable crisis. It doesn’t arrive with an alarm you can point to, or a single moment that makes everything obvious. Most of the time it’s subtler — almost polite. It slips into your life disguised as endurance, as productivity, as being “fine”.

And because you’re still functioning, the world keeps asking you to function.

The hardest part is that you can even convince yourself it’s not that bad. You’re doing your job. You’re responding to messages. You’re showing up. So you keep going — while something inside you quietly keeps paying the price.

But your body knows. Your mind knows. And eventually, you know too.

Early this year, I started noticing how much energy it took to look stable. How much effort went into being reliable, composed, useful — and how little was left for anything that felt like living. Not thriving, not even joy. Just the basic feeling of inhabiting my own days without constantly bracing.

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from performing stability while quietly falling apart. It doesn’t always break you in a dramatic way. Sometimes it does something worse: it slowly drains the color from your life, until everything starts to feel muted and heavy.

That was the beginning of my 2025.

And once you see that pattern clearly, it’s hard to unsee it. At some point, “keeping going” stops feeling like strength and starts feeling like avoidance — which is how I found myself standing in front of the next, harder question.

The decision that scared me

In May, I left my job — and I’ve replayed that moment in my head more times than I can count. Not because I regret it, but because it asked something from me that I didn’t know I still had. It wasn’t a bold, cinematic exit. It was a quiet decision made with a shaky kind of clarity, the kind you reach when you realize that staying is slowly costing you more than leaving ever could.

Leaving without another job lined up is a particular kind of fear. It feels like stepping off a cliff and trusting that the ground will somehow appear later. Your mind immediately starts producing scenarios, each one more convincing than the last: what if nothing comes next, what if I made a mistake, what if I’m not as good as I thought I was, what if I can’t find my way back.

But underneath all those questions, there was a quieter one — the one I avoided for the longest time because it was the most honest:

What if I stop… and realize how tired I really am?

I didn’t leave because I wanted a break. I left because I needed a chance to recover a part of myself I could feel slipping away. A part that had nothing to do with productivity or performance and everything to do with being able to live from the inside again.

And I want to name something clearly, without romanticizing any of it: I feel deeply privileged that I could make that choice. Not everyone can pause. Not everyone can afford uncertainty. Not everyone has enough margin to choose health over stability. I don’t take that for granted.

But privilege doesn’t make the leap painless. It doesn’t erase the fear, or the doubt, or the weight of not knowing what comes next. It just makes the option possible.

And still — even with all of that — it became the most important decision I made all year.

What came next wasn’t a neat reinvention. It was something quieter: time, space, and the slow work of rebuilding.

The pause that carried me forward

People call it a “career break”, which makes it sound like a neat little intermission — a pause between two chapters of the same story. But it didn’t feel like a break from my career as much as a return to myself. Less about stepping away from work, and more about stepping back into my own life with enough space to actually feel it.

What I gave myself wasn’t time to “do nothing”. It was room. Room to heal, to slow down, to stop measuring my worth in output and momentum. Room to look at the past without only seeing what I should’ve done, to sit with the present without immediately trying to fix it, and to let the future exist as a direction — not a plan I had to force into place.

That’s been the strange gift of pausing: when you finally stop running, you begin to see what you were running from… and what you were running toward. The noise fades just enough for the truth to become audible again.

I’ve used this time to rebuild my internal baseline — to notice patterns I had normalized, to question habits I once wore like badges, and to re-learn what my nervous system feels like when it isn’t constantly bracing. It wasn’t happiness. It wasn’t euphoria. It was something quieter and, in many ways, more precious:

Capacity.

The ability to hold life without feeling like I’m one bad week away from collapse. The ability to move through a day without constantly negotiating with exhaustion. The ability to be present — not just productive.

That matters more than I can explain.

And if you’re someone who has the opportunity to take a pause — even a small one — I want to say this gently: the fear is real. The uncertainty is real. The guilt can be loud. But health isn’t a luxury you earn after you’ve proven you deserve rest. It’s the foundation everything else stands on.

Sometimes the thing that looks like stopping is the only way to keep going.

This pause is what made forward movement possible again. Without it, I don’t think I’d be here writing this with any real clarity.

Eventually, clarity turns into movement — and for me, that meant re-entering the market with a different nervous system, but the same human vulnerability.

Back to the market, back to the noise

About a month or two ago, I returned to active job searching. I expected it to be hard in the practical sense — the scheduling, the prep, the constant context switching — but I underestimated how emotionally loud it would feel once I was in it again.

Job searching isn’t just logistics. It’s exposure. It’s taking pieces of yourself — your story, your judgment, your values, your leadership — and sending them out into spaces where you don’t control the narrative. It’s doing a lot of work that never shows up on a résumé: the thinking, the rehearsing, the careful choice of words, the effort to be both honest and concise, human and impressive.

And then you wait.

Some days it’s energizing. A good conversation lands and you feel that familiar spark of possibility. Other days it’s silence — the kind that turns your own mind into an interrogation room. A rejection arrives and, even when you understand it intellectually, it still knows how to press on old insecurities. And when you get ghosted, the hardest part isn’t even disappointment. It’s the strange shrinking feeling that comes from realizing you can be fully present, fully qualified, fully trying… and still be treated like a placeholder.

Sometimes you don’t even feel sad. You just feel… smaller.

And underneath the whole process, there’s a question that keeps resurfacing — not as a dramatic existential crisis, but as a quiet insistence: Am I looking for a role… or am I looking for a place where my values won’t be treated like a liability?

That question became sharper after a single exchange — not because it was harsh, but because it was honest in a way that clarified what I’m actually looking for.

A message that clarified a lot

In one process, I received a piece of feedback that stayed with me. It was framed politely — almost as a compliment — but the underlying message was clear: my emphasis on values and team wellbeing felt slightly out of sync with the kind of leadership they were optimizing for. They wanted someone more visibly driven by business outcomes, urgency, and speed, and my “people-first” lens seemed, to them, like something adjacent to that rather than part of it.

I read it more than once. Not because it offended me, but because it revealed a familiar fault line in how parts of the industry talk about leadership.

Here’s the thing: I understand why companies prioritize growth. I understand the pressure to move fast, to ship, to compete, to be profitable, to build something that survives. I’m not naïve about business reality — and I’m not romantic about work.

But I don’t accept the premise that caring about people is somehow disconnected from outcomes.

To me, values and wellbeing aren’t a soft accessory. They’re not a vibe you add when things are going well. They’re infrastructure. They’re the conditions that make real performance sustainable — the kind that doesn’t collapse the moment the pressure spikes.

• Burned-out teams don’t produce consistent impact.

• Fear-based cultures don’t produce good decisions.

• Constant pressure doesn’t create healthy urgency — it creates fragility.

You might get short-term output, yes. But you pay for it later, and you pay for it with people.

So no — I’m not anti-accountability. I’m not anti-impact. I’m not anti-urgency. I care deeply about results. I just care equally about how those results are produced, and what they cost.

I believe you can hold high standards and still protect people. I believe care isn’t the opposite of performance — it’s what makes performance last. And I believe leadership is not only what you deliver, but the environment you create while delivering it.

So feedback like that becomes a kind of red flag for me. Not because anyone is “wrong”, but because it clarifies fit. It tells me what they reward, what they tolerate, and what they’re willing to trade away when things get hard.

This is where I’m still sitting, honestly: I don’t know if 2026 will bring the place where I fully belong. But I do know what I’m no longer willing to trade away.

And when the industry feels noisy and misaligned, it helps to remember what did stay true this year — the parts of life that didn’t shrink when everything else felt uncertain.

What I’m grateful I didn’t lose

If there’s one thing 2025 reinforced, it’s that companies are temporary. They come with logos, roadmaps, structures, and seasons — and then, inevitably, they change. Teams reorganize, priorities shift, people move on. Even the most meaningful chapter is still a chapter.

But people aren’t.

One of the most grounding parts of this year has been realizing how much I carried with me from my last experience — not in the form of achievements or titles, but in the form of relationships. Incredible humans. Honest, caring, real. The kind of people who check on you without an agenda, who don’t need a reason to be kind, who make work feel less like a machine and more like a place where you’re allowed to be a person.

And then there’s a small part of my year that still makes me smile every time I think about it.

A friendship with a Product Manager and a Product Designer grew into something that didn’t fit inside the usual “we used to work together” box. We kept talking. We kept sharing ideas. We kept showing up for each other — and at some point, it became obvious we weren’t just staying in touch. We were building something.

We’re working on a product together now, and I feel genuinely proud of it — not only because of what it might become, but because of what it already represents. It has made me feel creatively alive again in a way I didn’t realize I missed. It’s the kind of collaboration that doesn’t drain you, but energizes you. The kind that reminds you why you loved creating things in the first place.

There’s a quiet kind of wealth in relationships that outlive the company. When professional connections turn into real friendships, when collaboration turns into trust, when “work people” quietly become “my people”… it changes how you measure a year.

It’s worth more than any title. More than any salary. More than any “career step”.

I don’t mean that poetically. I mean it literally.

That same thread — people being the point — also showed up in another place this year, in a way that surprised me.

The kind of impact that comes back to you

Mentoring gave me something this year I didn’t fully expect: joy. Not the loud, celebratory kind — more like a steady warmth that sits underneath everything else and quietly keeps you going.

I kept mentoring throughout 2025, and I’m grateful I did, because every now and then a message arrives that cuts through the noise and reminds you what matters. A mentee telling you they got the job. That they’re happy again. That they feel seen in their new team. That something you said helped them stay steady during a moment that could’ve knocked them off balance.

Those messages do something to me.

They feed my soul — not in a sentimental way, but in a deeply real one. They remind me that impact isn’t only measured in metrics, promotions, or org charts. Sometimes it’s quieter than that. Sometimes it looks like one person feeling less alone, one person trusting themselves again, one person stepping into a new chapter with a little more confidence than they had before.

And there’s something beautiful about that kind of impact: it doesn’t just move outward. It comes back to you.

Often exactly when you need it most.

And after a year shaped by pauses, uncertainty, and reconnection, it feels right to end it with a wish that matches the tone of everything I learned along the way.

A quieter wish for the new year

So here we are, at the end of 2025.

When I look back, I don’t see a year of big public milestones. I see a year that started heavy, a year that asked me to pause, and a year that gave me enough space to heal — not perfectly, not linearly, but genuinely. I see doubt, and I see clarity. I see difficult days, and I see the people who made those days feel lighter. More than anything, I see a reminder I don’t want to forget again: people are the point.

As the new year begins, I don’t have a dramatic resolution. I’m not chasing happiness anymore — at least not the kind that feels like a finish line you’re supposed to reach if you do everything right. I’m chasing something quieter. Something steadier. Something that can hold both joy and difficulty without breaking.

Serenity.

A famous Spanish writer once described it in one interview like this:

Serenity is feeling like a small tessera in a great mosaic — disposable, minimal, but in its place — forming part of something very large that we don’t fully know what it is.

That’s the direction I want.

Not to be constantly thrilled. Not to be endlessly productive. Not to win at life. Just to be in my place — to keep building, keep learning, keep caring, and keep moving forward without losing myself along the way.

If you’re reading this, I hope the new year brings you health. I hope it brings you gentleness. I hope it brings you the kind of work — and the kind of people — that don’t cost you your humanity.

And I hope you find your place in the mosaic, too.

Happy new year! 💜