I can’t believe this, but we get off the ship in 24 hours. As tradition demands, I’m sitting in the Wake View Bar at the very back of the ship sipping a Bloody Mary. This particular bar holds a lot of memories for me- the most dramatic of which was the morning in spring 2022 when I was killing time waiting to walk off into Mykonos only to see my wonderful room steward walking towards me really quickly. I can still hear her voice as she leaned towards me and barely whispered, “They said you have to come with me.”
I like to come here now and remember how much I love being free, healthy, safe. And while I’m certainly not ready for the trip to end, I’m incredibly pleased that it ends on my terms and not locked in a quarantine cabin!
A lot of this particular trip, for me, has been down time for my mind. I needed it so badly that I even realized I needed it and that’s saying something.
It’s been a…weird year. When I look back on it now, the second day of 2025, what I remember falls mostly into 2 categories: slowly losing almost all my favorite people at PayPal to layoffs and walking away from it myself.
I’ve experienced layoff culture for a long time. Too long. I myself was laid off way back in 1999 when the telecom and dot.com bubble burst. Lay offs at PayPal happened every single year I was there - 13 full years. Most years, they happened more than once. I can’t remember a time I didn’t know someone affected. But this year it was brutal. Some of my closest friends and colleagues. People who brought tremendous value, worked hard, and were genuinely a joy to be around.
And listen, I’m not naive or ignorant. I have 2 business degrees and I’ve worked for 3 publicly traded companies and 2 major universities. I understand that businesses need to make money.
Anyway, at the point I was ready to walk away, I consider myself tremendously lucky and grateful that there was something waiting for me. The thing was- I knew I needed to go but damn, it was hard. And I really, really needed time to process that and understand why and I didn’t get it. I worked Friday at PayPal and Monday I started at the new place. I told my brain to go on standby until this trip when I could let it stop processing all the required new things so that it could finally process the old things.
What I’ve learned about my poor, overworked brain is that I need a solid 2 weeks before it really believes it can rest. Anything shorter than 2 weeks won’t count as a vacation for my beleaguered mind. So, here I am somewhere between 2-3 weeks since my last day of work for the year. I haven’t been trying to figure out what the new acronym is, who does what, where things are, how to process an expense report OR what orchard chores to prioritize, how to sell the new olive oil, whether to try to source new bottles OR how to train our new dog, how to deal with rainy season this year, and whether the new/old/dead/alive cat really is someone’s missing house cat.
Finally, all of that paused. For real. And my brain can simply just wander. Free to think of things as they come up. Free to linger long enough to come to an understanding. Not pushed or rushed to judgement.
I think I’ll do my best, most clear thinking in the next couple of days before my brain has to move into dealing with getting home and returning to work.
Right now, what I’m coming to is that leaving PayPal was so hard because I really thought I could be a part of making it awesome again. I felt like I’d worked so hard for so long that leaving wasn’t the right thing. I wanted to see it through. I felt like I could be an important part of the needed change.
And I think I’m stuck wrestling with an old lesson I thought I’d learned awhile ago which is a combination of a)I’m really not that important and b)you don’t get to decide that you’re a part of the change. Sure, I know the famous quote too about being the change you want to see in the world. That’s not really what’s at play here. Sometimes we’re not the right person. Sometimes it’s not the right time or place. And sometimes, it just isn’t going to change like you want it to.
That’s when you decide whether you are ok with it and stay or declare you aren’t, and you go.
I was in a weird holding pattern because I’d mixed that all up. I’d decided I wasn’t ok with it and yet I stayed. And I’ve done that a few times in my life and it was always to my detriment so it was infuriating to find myself doing it again.
More on this and a wrap of the rest of the trip soon!
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