My “One Day I’ll Use This” Resignation Letter Just Got Used

I resigned from the Health Service today, and I’m still not entirely sure whether this is bravery or stupidity. Too late now, I suppose!

So, I did something today. Probably something that’s a bit mad. It’s kind of the thing you tell yourself you’re going to do, but you never actually do because you enjoy having a house to sleep in and would like to keep doing so.

I have, in the past hour, resigned from my job in the Health Service.

Just writing that sentence out felt strange. A bit heart-palpitaty.

It’s even stranger saying it out loud, like I just did a little while ago when I told my husband I was ready to send the email¹. In the moments before I hit “CMD-ENTER” to send my resignation letter flying off to my bosses, I kept expecting something to stop me - a divine intervention of some sort, like a gentle slap on my wrist from the universe reminding me that resigning just before Christmas is, quite frankly, the kind of decision a man who doesn’t have enough fibre in his diet would make - but here we are.

This was basically my brain when I hit CMD+ENTER - Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash

And I am, being perfectly frank, a little terrified. Like really terrified.

I joined the NHS in 2021 on a secondment from the firm I was working for at the time. I told myself I would come slum it in the public sector for six months before heading back to the private sector again.

I ended up staying for several years and giving a big chunk of my life to a system that I deeply care about, ended up working with people who I admire more than they know, and I can say with a straight face that I do not have a single regret about any of it. The role I’ve had over the past several years has been one of the highlights of my ever lengthening career.

This has, however, not come out of the blue - over the past several months, there was something that did snap inside me a little bit, and I found myself with a look of someone trying to smile just a little bit too convincingly and hoping no one notices my soul being crushed by the email or phone call I had just received that asked for yet more of me.

Through a combination of family pressures in South Africa, the cognitive dissonance of working for a Health Service that simultaneously asks you to grow and deliver more than ever while at the same time placing intense funding restrictions on how you are meant to do so, I reached a point that I honestly couldn’t do it anymore.

The league tables, the pressure, the managed decline and the performance reporting that feels like it consumes oxygen itself all led to me… just running out of bandwidth really. And energy. And the ability to contort myself into someone who is able to keep doing «gestures wildly» everything, just ended.

So, I have stepped away. Or I’ve jumped. Or leapt off a cliff edge while frantically googling “parachute delivery uk quick please”.

Which is now where the slightly panicked internal monologue of questions kicks in again - have I made a terrible mistake? Was this sensible? Should I have waited until, say, after Christmas instead of two weeks before? Is this the sort of decision that I’m going to look back on and call “character building” in the same way that other people describe being mugged or getting lost in a forest for several weeks?

I… I don’t know. Any of it, really.

I suppose what I do know is that I have been incredibly privileged to have built a semi-decent reputation in my field, and that I have been consulting over the past year or so and have clients that I can call on that will help me keep afloat a little bit and help me land on my feet.

This is also an opportunity to finally admit to myself that the writing I’ve been doing at all of you over the past several years isn’t just going to be something I do on the side anymore - it’s something that is going to be important in me being able to keep functioning as a full grown adult going forward.

I would really like to think that this isn’t just me taking a risk - a pretty massive one - but that I’m finally going to really do something I want to properly try.

I’m scared and I’m excited at the same time. I’m questioning my life choices about fifteen times an hour, but, I will also say that between the incredible anxiety, there is also a slight feeling of lightness, like I have maybe made the right decision without fully realising it yet or fully understanding the opportunities and possibilities yet.

So, from about February next year or so, I’ll be far more available to do writing, to do even bigger projects, maybe better collaborations and, if things go really well, even sleep from time to time. The next period is still going to be my notice period, and I’ll probably be doing the responsible(ish) adult thing - handovers, documentation and trying not to buy the whole of the M&S cheese aisle in a panic.

Mostly though, I just wanted to properly say thank you - for every single bit of the support that you as a community have given me over the time I’ve been trying to get Bearly Politics into something that resembles “seriousness”. It has grown into a wonderfully engaging and chaotic publication, even if it still has a fair distance to go, and it’s down to the thousands of you out there who have each contributed to making me braver than I would have been on my own, and I don’t take that for granted for even one second.

And if, for any reason, you don’t hear from me for a few days (not very likely), it’s just because I’ve lodged myself under the coffee table while whispering “it’s going to be fine, it’s going to be fine, it’s going to be fine” to myself until I believe it to be true.

Next post out after this one will be the chapter two debunking of 75 Brexit Benefits all about CBAMs and ETSs.

Until then, just thank you again,

Big Bear Love
Bear.

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1. He is fully on board and incredibly supportive because he is an amazing man.