When we last left our protagonist, she was in the midst of wrestling intergalactic warrior beasts figuring out how best to write the next chapter, given the tools at hand. It’s tempting to say the choices came without drawbacks; they didn’t. It’s tempting to say there was a lot of handwringing; there wasn’t.

I worked with HR at Simple to extend my leave, which gave me the space to investigate a few last things before ultimately deciding to…well, leave. That’s the short version. A long version can be acquired with approximately one (1) cup of coffee or similar; just be like, “you wanna get coffee on this particular weekday?”.

With some confidence, I can also now say that (if you’re in this situation anyway) getting bad news while you’re already sick is actually kind of terrific. You’re already listlessly petting the cat and watching Netflix, but since you’re sick, no one’s interested in telling you to “just get outside” or to “chin up” — they offer you tea and soup and encourage you to do whatever you want. So I had a weekend full of malaise, had honest talks about The Near Future with my partner, and then (largely at his urging) committed to taking some active semi-vacation, maintaining my “you still need to leave the house every day” requirement.

What I have been doing since this pivot?

• I helped Carye Bye with Hidden Portland‘s library organization project! I got excellent mentorship in choosing the good bits (and keeping them useful — dates matter!) and joyfully recycling the rest.
• I’ve had coffee/tea/resume-help rendez-vous with four former coworkers, all people I respect in different ways, and am meeting a fellow Portland Recurser on Friday.
• I took a day trip up to Tacoma to visit my almost-two-month-old niece (she’s two months old today!), and I brought homemade vegan chocolate chip cookies. Little Veera reminds me to breathe. We breathed in the lovely scent of their Christmas tree while her dad fixed the fence outside. We breathed at wildly different rates, with our wildly disparate lung sizes, while my sister caught a nap. I narrowly missed the complete shutdown of I-5 North.
• I helped an amazing friend move back somewhere that might have been home all along, and returned to my home with a new Dischidia ruscifolia (a Million Hearts plant).
• I accidentally found a posting for a job I’m really excited about (!), which put a wrench in my “don’t look at jobs just yet” plan.
• I am going to take a mid-week hike, now that the extremely torrential rainfall and landslides seem to have calmed down a bit.

And, following the really excellent advice of one of my former coworkers, I wrote out the good-parts-only story of my ~three and a half years at Simple. I ended up with two pages; I am a little shocked at how proud I am of what I DID do there. There’s a lot!

Now it just needs to get distilled into resume-sized tidbits. Onward!