What isn't negotiable

In August I stepped down as Chief Technology Officer.

I’m not going to name anyone or give the full account, because that isn’t what I want to leave in writing. But one detail, because it’s the one that put everything else in order: my grandfather died, and I was expected to keep working through those days.

The day he died I woke up in bad shape. Everything hurt. It was raining, and rain always makes the pain worse. Then the call came: get to the hospital, quickly, with my grandmother. I jumped out of bed and the pain wasn’t there. It was completely gone.

I held up like that all that day and all through the funeral the next. Strong, present, functioning. Then everything blew up. The pain came back much worse than before.

The body can lend you strength it doesn’t have. It collects afterward.

You’d think a decision like this arrives in a moment of clarity. Mine went the other way. The clarity came afterward, once I no longer had the energy to keep explaining to myself why I was putting up with it.

Some things aren’t negotiable. Grief is one. Health is another. And I had been negotiating both for a while.

It had been a long time since I really rested. Between work — sometimes in more than one place at once — and studying at the same pace, you build up a tiredness that a weekend of sleep doesn’t touch. It holds for a while. Then it stops holding.

The first is the body. I’ve written before about what it means to work with a chronic illness: good days, bad days, the need to plan with margin instead of at the limit. What I hadn’t understood is how easily a leadership role burns through that margin without you noticing. A job like that eats the invisible things first — the rest, the good hours, the ability to say “not today.” I want those back before the price is something else.

The second is research. I want to bet on that path properly: publishing, seeking partnerships with research centers, sustaining a line of my own instead of scattered projects. That isn’t built in the leftover hours. It needs headspace and continuity, and both were going somewhere else.

The third is that things are coming. There are projects on the way that genuinely excite me — the kind I want to give my full attention, not whatever is left at the end of the day. One of them is the chronicle and documentary about my grandfather. The interviews are still pending, and the memory of the people who knew him keeps scattering. I don’t want to be late for that too.

And the fourth is that I want to build something of my own. Not run someone else’s company: build mine, with the decisions I would make. Including the decisions about how the people who work there get treated.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion. Just the feeling, for the first time in a long while, that the next few months are mine.