The One-Foot Risk: Why I’m Leaving a Career I Loved

I left my job. Kind of.

After nearly a decade in my career, last week I had my last day in my full-time role. But I’m not fully gone. I’m staying on part-time to support the transition, which means I am both there and not there at the same time. It isn’t a clean ending, and I don’t think I anticipated how much that would matter.

What feels most important to say, though, is this: I am not leaving because anything was wrong.

There is a common narrative around leaving a job, especially one you have been in for a long time. It usually involves burnout, or toxicity, or a clear moment where things stop making sense. It is easier to explain a transition when there is something to point to and say, “this is why I had to go.”

That is not what this is.

In many ways, my career still fits. The work matters deeply to me. I believe in the services, the team, and the population we serve with my whole heart. This was not just a job I had; it was something I worked incredibly hard to build. It was a role I grew into over time, a leadership position I felt proud of, and one I could have easily seen myself staying in long-term, maybe even for the rest of my career.

Which is exactly what makes this so difficult to explain.

There was no breaking point. There was no moment where everything suddenly stopped working. If anything, the shift was much quieter than that. It showed up more like a feeling that I could not quite name at first, but also could not ignore.

It was not that something was wrong. It was that something no longer felt like the whole picture.

Sitting in that space is uncomfortable in a way that is hard to articulate. It is much easier to leave when something is clearly broken. It is much harder when something is good, when it works, when you have built something meaningful and stable and aligned in many ways. It is even harder when other people might look at your life and your career and wonder why you would ever consider stepping away from it.

But there was a steady pull that kept showing up.

It did not arrive all at once, and it was not loud or urgent. Instead, it showed up gradually, in ways that were easy to dismiss at first. It was there in the way I found myself thinking differently about therapy work, and in the curiosity I felt about doing that work in a way that was more personal and more flexible. It showed up in the way I started questioning how I wanted to structure my time, and how I wanted to show up not just professionally, but personally. It was present in the ideas I kept coming back to; about building something that felt more aligned with the life I want to live now, not just the path I had committed to years ago.

For a while, I tried to rationalize it away. I reminded myself of everything that made sense about staying. I thought about the stability, the impact, the identity I had built within this role. All of that was still true, and it still is.

But the feeling did not go away.

It continued to surface in small moments, in repeated thoughts, and in the quieter spaces where I could not distract myself from it. Eventually, it became something I could not ignore without also ignoring a part of myself.

So I started making changes. Not all at once, and not in a dramatic or impulsive way, but slowly and intentionally.

I kept my full-time role and at the same time, I took on therapy work on the side. I had been licensed for years but had never fully pursued that path because I genuinely believed my original career trajectory was the right one for me. Still, something in me kept nudging me to try it, even if only in a small way. So I gave myself the space to explore it.

Over time, that exploration turned into something more significant.

The work brought out a part of me I had not felt in a long time. I found myself feeling more creative, more curious, and more energized. I discovered that I loved the therapy work in a way I had not expected. That did not diminish the meaning of the work I was already doing; it simply revealed something additional that felt important and aligned in a different way.

At the same time, I found myself creating more in other areas of my life; writing, building, and thinking more intentionally about how I want to connect with people and the kind of work I want to be doing moving forward. What started as a small spark grew into something that felt harder and harder to set aside.

Eventually, I reached a point where continuing to ignore that pull felt more uncomfortable than responding to it.

Making that shift has not been simple or clean. It has not been a matter of closing one door and confidently walking through another. Instead, it has felt layered and, at times, contradictory. There has been excitement and sadness, certainty and doubt, energy and fear, all existing at the same time.

This was never just a job for me. It became a significant part of how I saw myself. The leadership role, the work itself, and the future I had imagined within it all contributed to my sense of identity. For a long time, I believed this was what I would be doing indefinitely. So stepping away from that does not just change what I do day to day; it shifts how I understand who I am professionally and personally.

And that kind of shift brings questions I do not always have clear answers to. Am I really okay walking away from something I worked this hard for? Am I ready to move toward something that is less defined and less certain? What does it mean to choose alignment over clarity?

What I am stepping into is not one clearly mapped-out path. It is a combination of things I am building in real time: a therapy practice, opportunities for workshops and trainings, creative work, and new ways of connecting with the populations I care deeply about. It feels meaningful and aligned, but it is also, in many ways, unknown.

As much as I loved my leadership role, what matters most in this season of my life has shifted. It is time with my daughters while they are still young and want to spend that time with me. It is being present for the everyday moments that are easy to miss when life feels too full. It is creating space to build something that reflects who I am now, not just who I was when I first chose my career path.

Alignment does not cancel out grief.

I am not walking away from something I did not care about. I am stepping away from something I loved in order to make space for something new. I do not feel like I am losing something entirely, but I do recognize that I am becoming something different.

I have never been someone who takes big, sweeping risks. I tend to value stability, predictability, and having a clear plan. So this transition does not look like a dramatic leap forward. It looks like something much more gradual.

It looks like stepping forward with one foot while the other still lingers where I have been. That is what I have come to think of as a one-foot risk.

It is not a clean break. It is not a moment of complete certainty. It is a willingness to move toward something new while still holding onto what has been meaningful and foundational.

Maybe that is what growth actually looks like; not starting over entirely, not walking away completely, but allowing space for something new to exist alongside what already does, and trusting that, over time, the next step will become clearer.

And if you are in a place where nothing is necessarily wrong, but something does not feel complete, you do not have to blow everything up to follow that feeling.

You can start by making space.

Even if one foot is still planted exactly where you are.