I was driving on my way to my patient. I knew this road. I'd been on this route for too long. I could drive it with my eyes closed. But this time was different. My heart was racing. My mind flooded with questions I'd been ignoring for months. "Why are you still here?" "When are you going to quit?" "What other signs do you need before you pull the plug?"

My vision blurred. My heart pounded. And then I felt it, my soul lifting out of my body. I watched myself driving on autopilot, hands on the wheel, but I wasn't there anymore. I tried to snap out of it. I hit my legs. I yelled as loud as I could. Eventually I had to slap my face a few times to pull myself back in.

This was the third time I'd had to cancel work early. Usually it was because I had to go to the hospital, only to be told I was having a panic attack. But this time was different. This time, I was finally listening to my body's plea for freedom from the cage I'd built myself.

I handed in my resignation letter that same night. I walked away from nearly a decade in a career I'd chosen because it looked impressive on paper, because it made my parents proud, because it was what you were supposed to want. The panic attacks were my body screaming what I'd refused to admit: I was running on a hamster wheel, working a job I didn't want to buy things I didn't need to impress people I didn't like.

That was 2024. My year of destruction.

The panic attacks weren't even the worst of it. I had a medical surgery that didn't go as planned and had to be redone. My recovery dragged on for months, painful and uncertain. My body broke down the same year my mind did. Everything I'd built, everything I thought defined me, collapsed at once.

2025 became my year of putting the pieces back together. I finally sought help and admitted out loud: I'd wasted years chasing a version of success that wasn't mine. I'd measured my worth by my job title and my salary, by the designer clothes hanging in my closet and the latest laptop I barely used. All of it was performance. None of it was me.

The hardest part of the healing process wasn't reliving the panic attacks or the surgery. It was grieving the life I'd abandoned, not because I missed it, but because I'd spent so long building it. Ten years of doing the "right" thing, taking the "safe" route, only to realise the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.

But here's what I learned: time is the only thing you can't earn back. While I was postponing my real life. The one where I did work that mattered to me, pursued things I actually valued, those years were disappearing. I was trading my finite days for a paycheck that funded a lifestyle designed to signal success to strangers.

Now it's almost 2026, and I'm facing the question that terrifies me most: what comes next?

The practical answer is obvious. I haven't worked in a year and a half. I could go back. Update the resume, take some calls, slide back into the system. It would be easier. Safer. It would quiet the voices asking when I'm going to get a "real job" again.

But I know what that wheel feels like now. I know the sound it makes, the speed it demands, the way it keeps you too busy to notice you're going nowhere. I can't unhear it.

So I'm choosing the harder thing. I'm going to keep pursuing work that aligns with who I actually am, not who I thought I needed to be. I want to live with intention. I want to examine the traps we fall into. The belief that worth equals salary, that success means impressing strangers, that safety is more important than meaning. And find a way to break free from them.

I don't know what that looks like yet. I don't have it figured out. But I'd rather spend 2026 building something true than rebuilding something that already broke me once.

The hamster wheel is still there. It's always there. But I'm not getting back on.