Why I chose to leave my successful UX career

Building the wrong thing faster doesn’t help.

Photo Credit: Unsplash, Jens Lindner

After a few scrappy startups, I landed a role at Google, then switched to Facebook, where I gained more money and leadership opportunities. My career plan was moving along smoothly; I never imagined leaving. Move to San Francisco, cultivate UX mentorships, build credibility, and earn a multi-six-figure income while solving the world’s most critical problems.

But gradually, my inner pain grew too loud to ignore. It’s been one year since I turned in my credentials at Facebook, and I have no desire to continue building a career in technology.

Despite the external success, I felt anxious, disillusioned, tired, stressed out, and overwhelmed with my basic tasks. I burned out and felt like a failure.

But with an excellent fall-back portfolio and large savings fund, I took an open-ended soul-searching sabbatical. Through Jungian depth therapy, trauma healing, and several shadow work methods, I discovered two key root causes for my burnout:

• Dysfunctional family: My therapist helped me identify multiple narcissists in my birth family and adult relationships; decades of abuse had significantly damaged my self-worth. As a result, I developed codependency tendencies, people-pleasing, and perfectionism. With low self-esteem, I sucked at having personal boundaries.
• Cultural patriarchy: Growing up in conservative Christianity, I assumed the “women can’t be leaders” style of sexism mainly existed in religious realms. But as I immerse myself in Jungian psychology and feminine literature, I see the core imbalances in our workplace structures (and in myself). We need much more than sexual harassment training for a sense of balance.

Now, I’ve begun metabolizing anger from emotional, sexual, and physical abuse into creative work that empowers and frees others. I’m discovering that burnout and toxic work environments are merely surface issues, symptoms of much deeper dysfunctions.

As I leaped into the fires of uncertainty, I felt ready to get very uncomfortable.

I believed technology would solve huge problems.