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I quit.
TL;DR
There's a conversation every HR leader has rehearsed in their head at least once. The one where you finally say it. Where you stop being the person who holds everything together and you just... let go.
Episode 13 is that conversation.
A recruiter reaches out to Kelly at the worst possible time, right after she's spent weeks questioning her own judgment. She entertains the conversation. She starts evaluating the opportunity seriously. And then Daniel does something small, almost forgettable, that finally makes the decision for her.
Was this email forwarded to you? Your friend has taste. You can stop depending on it.
The Situation
The recruiter's name was Amara. She reached out on a Thursday afternoon with the kind of message Kelly usually archived without reading. "I know you're not looking. Nobody at your level ever is. But I think this one's worth a conversation."
Kelly almost deleted it. She'd gotten these before. They were always flattering and rarely relevant.
But this Thursday was different. She was three weeks past the Rina situation. She'd handled it well, everyone said so, but something had shifted in her that she couldn't quite reset. The confidence she'd carried for years felt slightly less automatic. Like a muscle that still worked but now she noticed it working.
She replied that evening. "I'll take a call. No promises."
The Spiral
The role was CPO at a company called Meridian Health. Series C, 400 people, growing fast. The CEO was a former operator who'd apparently told the recruiter, "I don't want someone who makes HR look good. I want someone who makes the company work."
Kelly liked that line, even knowing it was probably rehearsed.
Amara walked her through the basics. Comp was strong. The team was small but well-regarded. The CEO had a reputation for actually listening to his leadership team, which felt like a strange thing to highlight until Kelly realized how much it said about what she'd gotten used to.
"What's broken?" Kelly asked. She always asked this first.
"Honestly? Nothing catastrophic. They've outgrown their systems. The founder built the early culture on instinct and it held, but they're at the size where instinct stops scaling. They need someone to build the infrastructure before things start cracking."
Kelly knew that problem. She'd solved it once already at LumaCore. The idea of doing it again, but earlier, with a CEO who might actually partner with her instead of treating her like cleanup crew, sat in her chest in a way she didn't expect.
"Send me the details," she said. "I'll think about it."
She told herself she was just exploring. That's what you're supposed to say.
Over the next week, Kelly did what she'd tell any HR leader to do. She stopped thinking about the new opportunity and started honestly evaluating the one she had.
She asked herself the questions she'd asked a hundred candidates and employees over the years, except this time they were pointed at her own life.
Am I still learning here? She thought about it. The answer was complicated. She was learning, but mostly she was learning how to manage around the same problems. The problems weren't new anymore. Her solutions were just getting more efficient.
Does leadership actually value what I do, or do they value having someone in the seat? That one stung. She'd earned her credibility at LumaCore through crisis after crisis. But earning it and being valued for it weren't the same thing. She kept having to re-prove her relevance every quarter.
What would I tell someone else in my situation? This was the question that bothered her most, because she knew exactly what she'd say. She'd say: if you're asking the question, you already know something's off.
She also thought about what she'd be leaving behind. Maya, who'd grown enormously under her. The systems she'd built that were finally starting to work. The team that trusted her. That stuff wasn't nothing.
And she thought about Meridian. Fresh start. A CEO who seemed to understand what a CPO actually does. The chance to build from earlier in the curve instead of constantly retrofitting.
She didn't make a decision. But she noticed she was spending more time thinking about what Meridian could be than about what LumaCore was becoming.
The Moment
The contract came through on a Tuesday.
LumaCore had landed a major enterprise deal. The kind that changes a company's trajectory. Sales had closed it, obviously, but the deal had almost fallen apart twice, once because of a key hire that Kelly's team had landed in 11 days flat, and once because the client's due diligence flagged organizational stability, which Kelly had personally addressed on a call with their procurement team.
Daniel sent a company-wide Slack message at 4:30 pm.
Kelly read it twice.
She scrolled down to see if there was a second message. There wasn't.
She checked if maybe he'd sent her a separate DM. He hadn't.
Maya appeared at her door about ten minutes later. She didn't say anything. She just leaned against the doorframe with a look that said I saw it too.
"Don't," Kelly said.
"I wasn't going to."
"He probably just forgot."
Maya didn't respond to that, which was its own kind of response.
Kelly sat at her desk for a while after Maya left. She wasn't angry, exactly. Anger would have been easier. Anger gives you something to do. This was flatter than that. It was the feeling of realizing that the person you report to doesn't think about you when things go well. Only when things go wrong.
She thought about every crisis she'd navigated that year. The RTO disaster. Calibration. The investigation. The rumor. Nikolai. The counteroffer. The board meeting. AI adoption. The comp leak. Continuous feedback. Burnout. Rina. Twelve rounds of saving things that other people broke, and when the big win came, she wasn't even an afterthought. She was just not in the story.
She pulled up the Meridian offer on her personal laptop. Read through the terms again. The role was real. The opportunity was real. The CEO had followed up personally with a note that said, "I've talked to enough CPOs to know what they deal with. I don't want that for you here."
Maybe that was a line too. But right now it landed differently than it would have landed a week ago.
The Decision
Kelly left the office at 6:15. She drove home without music, which she only did when she was processing something she hadn't fully admitted to herself yet.
She made dinner. She sat on the couch. She opened her laptop.
She thought about calling Maya. She thought about sleeping on it. She thought about all the advice she'd given over the years about not making career decisions when you're emotional.
Then she thought about the fact that she'd been emotional about this job for months. The Slack message wasn't the reason. It was just the moment where she stopped pretending the reasons didn't add up.
She opened her email and started typing.
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She stared at it for five minutes. Then she hit send.
Her phone buzzed almost immediately. Maya.
"Hey, just checking in. You okay?"
Kelly looked at the sent folder. Then back at Maya's text.
"Not really," she typed. "Can I call you tomorrow?"
She put her phone face down on the coffee table and closed her laptop.
For the first time in a long time, she didn't check Slack before bed.
Dear Kelly
You've vented to a friend. You've laughed with your team. Now tell Kelly. Dear Kelly is collecting the real-world HR stories that deserve to be told, the messy, painfully familiar ones. Drop yours here. Your story might even inspire the next edition.
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