For a long time, I’ve been calling my departure from a life of forced labor “leaving the corporate world.” But I think that’s been a misshaping of the truth. What I’ve really been doing is pulling away from the part of me that longed for external approval and that felt compelled to follow someone else’s rules without questioning the impact of that on my soul. Especially the kind of approval I once tried to get by earning money and behaving as a man with the utmost competence, professionalism, and control, even if only on the surface, but never really at all. If the leash was convincing myself that a job and money were freedom, leaving LinkedIn is the tearing asunder of the last shred of that tether and a step forward as myself.

I hibernated my profile and uninstalled the LinkedIn app this morning after weeks of internal debate and then suddenly scrolling through two especially nauseating posts right after the other. One was a self-congratulatory achievement parade disguised as insight and emptahy. The other was a man claiming he’d solved DEI and proved it with a glowing white-toothed, full-bodied selfie and 14,000 likes. It wasn’t the content so much as the pattern I saw in all of it: the relentless game of polishing yourself for others. I realized I’d been standing in that hall of mirrors for too long.

Looking at my own resume stretching back to 1998 and The Gardner News, it’s not nothing. There are jobs I did well. Teams I helped. Whole structures I shaped. But the truth is, I was trying to heal things inside myself (and between me and Danielle) through a mirage of stability and workaday consumption that was never going to resonate with me. I thought if I could just earn enough though, be dependable enough, get far enough, it would all finally click into place. But the more I tried to prove myself in those spaces, the further I drifted from who I really was. It’s an old and common story, really, which is part the reason it was so shocking to me that I fell into it.

I was only focused on trying to live up to what I was raised and hypnotized to believed was “right” even at the cost of the direction of my own moral compass and my relationships. And while I can forgive the younger version of me — and even my mother for the hypnosis — for trying so hard and diving into someone else’s nightmare, I see now how much I sacrificed. Not just time. Not just creativity. But presence. The ability to actually be with my life instead of constantly managing the optics of it.

What’s different now is that I’m no longer following that path, and I’m trying to open up this realization, breathe into it, and let it move through me until it’s the truth. The last time I was in Peru, I was there for two main reasons, one of which was to reclaim a sense of personal autonomy. Dropping this last vestige of a self that no longer serves me is the next part of that reclamation.

So yeah, I’m letting LinkedIn go. Not because it’s inherently bad, but because it represents something I’m done feeding. I’m reclaiming that energy. And today, I’m using it to write this. Not as a brand. Not as a call to action. Just as a mark on the trail: I was here. I changed. I met and know a lot of interesting people working in a world that I was never a part of and to which I’m not planning on going back.