“You Can Quit Your Job Now” — My Partner’s Words
After the video call ended, I opened the door to leave my room, still carrying a surge of pent-up indignation. At that moment, my partner was standing there. I was taken aback. It seemed they had heard my exchange with Mari through the door.
During remote meetings, we were always careful not to make loud noises around the house. Because of that, my partner had never stood outside my room like this before.
We faced each other in silence for a brief moment. Then, with an expression that seemed to blend concern with resignation, they said:
“You can quit your job now. Naoki, you’re not yourself anymore.”
“I heard shouting downstairs, so I came down. You were yelling. That was someone from work, wasn’t it?”
“Why does it get that bad? It’s not normal. You should quit. Go to a psychiatrist tomorrow.”
Hearing those words, I finally allowed myself to rest. One of the reasons I had been unable to do so until then was my sense of responsibility towards my family.
Beyond that, I had long been living with a profound difference in values between my partner and myself.
Why I Couldn’t Take Time Off — The Trauma of Losing My Job
More than a decade earlier, I had lost my job at a different company due to redundancy. Unfortunately, it happened just after I got married. That experience cast a long shadow over our trust, our daily life, and our plans for the future.
Even now, recalling the moment I was told I was being made redundant feels like my chest is being torn apart.
For a long time, I carried a sense of guilt towards my partner because of that incident. In addition, there were several moments during our marriage when we received financial support from my partner’s parents. That, too, weighed heavily on me, intensifying an already excessive sense of responsibility.
Layered together, these experiences and traumas left me unable to give myself permission to step away from work.
I later learned that when I lost my job, my partner had been told by relatives that they might have been “deceived”. Of course, that was not the case. But it is true that the hardship we faced early in our marriage became one of the roots of a long-standing mistrust.
At the same time, I was also carrying unresolved problems within my family of origin. I feared that if I lost my job again, my family back home would collapse along with me.
Bound by this distorted sense of responsibility, I simply could not bring myself to let go of my work.
What I Learned from Losing a Power Struggle — On Organisations and Leadership
Several months after taking sick leave, I resigned without ever returning to the workplace.
Throughout my period of rest up to the present day, memories of my former company have surfaced almost daily. I invested enormous effort in trying to communicate with senior management, yet it is possible that the entire sequence of events had already been paving the way towards my departure. There is no way to know now. Still, whenever I think back on those painful days, a sense of defeat threatens to stop me in my tracks.
However, although I do not in any way affirm or justify what happened, now that I have engaged in cognitive restructuring, I am able to accept it as one part of my life experience. Through that experience, I learned first-hand about organisations, leadership, and team-building.
The arrival of a new manager following organisational restructuring was undeniably a turning point in my life. Even so, I believe that regardless of who that manager had been, I would eventually have been swept up in the larger tide of a deteriorating corporate culture. I had grown ill-suited to the company’s underlying environment. Given my personality—one that does not readily entrust itself to others—it is likely that I would have chosen to move on to another company sooner or later.
At the same time, I should have responded more rationally, even under circumstances that refused to go my way. Back then, I lacked the patience, wisdom, and experience required to do so. I might have benefited from a better understanding of employment law, or from learning how to deflect and navigate others’ behaviour more strategically. Instead, I confronted everything head-on, with stubborn sincerity.
Even so, I do not regret having voiced my views to senior management. Not only within corporate organisations, but in society as a whole, I believe we have a responsibility to speak out against what violates our moral sense. I do not want to live by silently submitting to what feels wrong.
I was far from flawless. Yet the fact that I acted according to my conscience in the midst of such hardship has now become a source of inner support as I step into a new phase of my life.
The Next Chapter — The First Time I Saw a Psychiatrist
In the next chapter, I look back on the day I saw a psychiatrist for the first time. It marked my initial step towards cognitive restructuring and learning how to make peace with my past.
