The sirens on the way to Silverdale were a screaming reminder that the math just wasn’t adding up anymore. For eleven years, I’d been calculating my life in “years to retirement,” like a prisoner marking days on a cell wall. But while my brain was focused on that 20-year “sweet spot,” my body had started counting in minutes of focused breathing in between crashing waves of pain.

Watching those blurry Washington evergreens whip past the ambulance window, the pension I’d been chasing started to feel like a ghost story—a promised land I’d never actually live to see. I thought about the communities I’d poured myself into since 2014 and the strategic programs I’d helped rebuild from chaos. I loved that work, but it was finally asking me the one question I couldn’t dodge: Is the “security” of my future worth the cost of my pulse?

The reality hit me harder than the physical pain: I was being a martyr for a system that would have my job posted on a recruitment board before my obituary even hit the local paper.

“Quitter”, the still small voice whispered. The negative feedback loop on repeat played in my head for weeks following my resignation. As my honey once said, “The human mind can be an asshole”, and mine was putting me through it. I vacillated between believing that I had made the best decision of my life to thinking I needed to have myself psychologically evaluated.

What had I done? I had worked diligently to help the underserved in my community in very rural, poverty stricken areas. In this season of my life I had witnessed the very best in others and sadly, the very worst. I had 11 years of service in and only had 9 more to go to hit that sweet spot of retirement earnings.

Only

9 years snapped into one epic moment as I sat paralyzed in pain on a toilet in the McDonalds of Belfair, Washington – and a costly ambulance ride to Silverdale to boot. Stripped of my dignity, wheeled out on a stretcher, feeling very much tarred and feathered in the public square, there was no going back to the grind.

As I lay there, the ghosts of the Rhine River Valley seemed to crowd the ambulance. My ancestors, who measured a day’s worth in tilled soil and finished quilts, didn’t have a category for ‘chronic pain’ or ‘stress induced colitis .’ To them, there was only the work.

“Quitter”, the ghosts of generations passed whispered spurred on by the asshole running the control panel of my brain.

How does one make peace with the steady, judging gaze of a Germanic ancestry line that ran a direct route from The Rhine River Valley to the outskirts of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania? Growing up the phrase, “we are made of good stock” was used as soothing balm when we wanted to give up or facing adversity. The matriarchs in my family were strong Pennsylvania Dutch who measured ones worth to exist and take up space by the tasks that were accomplished in the day.

I spent forty years believing my worth was tied to my output. I was running from an ancestral ledger that was not mine to balance – beliefs about worth and work that were mere echoes of the past. Now, in the quiet tendrils of mist rolling in with the tides, I’m having to learn how to take up space without a task list. I’m learning to silence the ‘Quitter’ and listen to the soul.