Nobody suspects the man who works late.
The one who takes the extra shift, answers the Sunday email, volunteers for the thing nobody wants. Everyone calls it dedication. Some call it providing. Your boss calls it a great attitude.
But you know what it actually is, in that last minute in the driveway before you finally go inside the house.
The work is where you know who you are. There's a task, a metric, a next thing. Nobody in the building asks how you actually are, and that's the appeal. For eight or ten or twelve hours, the questions you can't answer get replaced by questions you can.
It didn't start as hiding. It started as being good at something. Somewhere in there the job quietly changed functions, from the thing you do into the place you go so you don't have to be anywhere else.
Here's the tell. Rest doesn't feel like relief anymore. It feels like exposure.
If a slow Saturday makes you itchy for Monday, it was never about the deadline.
The one thing:
What are you at work not having to feel?
Josh
P.S. I finished my 30-day Ash Journal run on July 30. In public, one page a day, no edits, all thirty.
Five minutes. One prompt. One line of ash. The first seven days are free: truevitalyou.com/journal