I Had a Resignation Letter on My Computer for Years. Here Is Why I Finally Sent It.

I had a resignation letter sitting on my computer for years.

Years. Plural. Not months. Not a draft I started once and forgot about. A living document that I returned to periodically, updated as the situation evolved, and still did not send.

That letter was the most honest thing I had produced in a professional context, and it lived in a folder on my desktop like a secret I was keeping from myself.

How Fear Wears a Business Suit

I want to tell you about all the very reasonable, very sophisticated ways that fear disguised itself as practicality while I kept that letter in the drawer.

There was the financial reason. Real and legitimate. I had a mortgage. I had people depending on my income. Walking away from a steady government paycheck felt like recklessness disguised as courage.

There was the identity reason. I had worked hard for the position I held. The title, the team, the institutional respect that comes from having been somewhere long enough that your presence is assumed.

There was the timing reason. It was never quite the right moment. There was always one more thing that needed to happen first.

None of these were lies. They were all genuinely true. But they were also genuinely true things that I was using as reasons when they were actually excuses.

The Bathroom Mirror Moment

When the buyout offer came, I did not take it seriously at first.

And then one day I was in the bathroom at work. Just an ordinary moment in an ordinary day. I looked at myself in the mirror. Not the professional version of myself, not the performed version. Just me, in a fluorescent-lit bathroom, somewhere in the middle of another day of showing up for something I had already outgrown.

And something in me asked, quietly and without drama: if not now, then when?

Then the second question: why not bet on yourself?

I had bet on other things my entire career. I had bet on a real estate market that crashed. I had bet on an institution that had shifted under my feet. And I had never once made the same full-throated bet on myself.

I went back to my desk. I pulled up the paperwork. I signed it.

The Door Closed. A New Chapter Began.

My last day, I turned in my badge. I recorded myself leaving the building because I knew I would want to remember it.

I did not want to leave this earth without having tried.

If you have your own letter in a drawer — a resignation, a conversation you have been avoiding, a truth you have not said out loud — I wrote a whole book about what it takes to finally send it.

Put the Cape Down: You Were Never Supposed to Save Everyone is available now on Amazon.

The show is over. Your real life is just beginning.

Shaunita N. Holley is a published author, serial entrepreneur, and digital business strategist. She is the founder of ExitToDigital.com.