I Quit My Dream Job Five Years Ago. Here's What No One Tells You

When I was a little girl, my doctor used to call himself "Dr. Rabbit." There were stickers involved. It seemed like the most wonderful thing a person could do with their life.

Fast forward a few decades, and I was living that dream, trained in the same group, seeing my own patients, teaching residents I adored. By every external measure, I had made it.

And I was drowning.

For years, I told myself I couldn't leave. My patients needed me. My residents needed me. Everything I looked at on the job boards looked like more of the same. I was stuck in the very particular kind of misery that comes from being a high-achieving, deeply caring person in a system that has learned to use those qualities against you.

The breaking point came in August of 2020, not in a meeting, not in a performance review, not in yet another message about productivity metrics. It came in a vein surgeon's exam room, when a doctor I'd never met asked how I was doing, and I burst into tears.

She offered me a job on the spot. And the fact that I could imagine it, that some other reality felt possible, that was everything.

What actually goes into leaving

I didn't quit that day. What followed was a deliberate, months-long process: pursuing a board certification in obesity medicine I'd been putting off for years, coordinating benefits with my husband, drafting a resignation letter I sat on for an extra week (because a $20,000 retention check was coming… and that was a very reasonable reason to wait).

I also did something just as important: I prepared myself emotionally. Friends who had left before me told me not to expect my employer to apologize, to beg me to stay, to show any real regret. That advice was a gift. When the response came, a polite, dispassionate HR email, I was ready. I didn't need them to validate my decision. I had already done that for myself.

The quiet quit that actually matters

Here's something I want to be clear about: leaving your job is not the only version of this story.

There is another kind of quitting that is just as powerful, and it doesn't require a resignation letter. It's quitting the belief that your employer determines your worth. It's quitting the hustle for approval that never quite arrives. It's unsubscribing from the thought that if you just work harder, longer, more selflessly, eventually someone will tell you that you're enough.

We were trained to be people pleasers. We were socialized, especially as women in medicine, to put everyone else's needs first, to keep earning our place, to make ourselves smaller so others feel more comfortable. The system doesn't just tolerate that; it profits from it.

Whether you leave or stay, that is the work. Deciding you are no longer available for thoughts that were never true to begin with.

What's been waiting on the other side

Five years out, I can tell you that the uncertainty was real. The discomfort was real. The one patient who called me selfish; I still remember her name.

But I can also tell you what I've built: a coaching certification, a podcast that's now over 220 episodes deep, group and individual coaching, expert witness work, and a way of practicing medicine that actually fits the life I want to live. I have tried things. I have explored things. I have become more of who I am.

None of that was available to me when I was white-knuckling my way through the job I thought I had to keep.

This story belongs to you too

If any of this resonates, if you've been staring at the job boards, or telling yourself you can't leave, or quietly wondering what it would feel like to just stop, I made a whole episode about this.

Episode 221 of Ending Physician Overwhelm is called "The One Where I Quit My Dream Job," and it's an honest, un-filtered look at the journey: the tears in the exam room, the resignation letter, the three-month goodbye, and what it's taken to build something new.

🎧 Episode 221: The One Where I Quit My "Dream" Job

Because deciding to leave doesn't have to be the end. And it doesn't have to be as scary as it feels right now.

It can be the beginning of everything.