The third acquisition felt different from the first two.
Not because the process was harder. Because something in me had changed.
The pattern was familiar by then. The travel to their headquarters. The meetings designed to look like collaboration but built around extraction. How does your system work. Who owns this process. Walk us through your methodology. All delivered with the warm language of integration while behind the curtain the real question was simpler. What do we need and what can we eliminate.
You learned to navigate it. Not for yourself. For the people on your team who were watching you and trying to read whether they were going to be okay. You shared what was necessary. You protected what you could. You fought quietly for the people who had trusted you with their careers and did not have the visibility or the title to fight for themselves.
When it was over and the dust settled, you started again. New structure. New leadership. New set of expectations to decode. And the team that survived intact looked to you to help them find their footing in something that no longer felt familiar.
Then the next one came.
At home the math looked different.
More travel. More uncertainty. More nights in a hotel room in a city I had not chosen, calling home to a family absorbing stress I had carried there without meaning to. The will I have a job question that never fully went away even when the answer turned out to be yes. The conversations that started with how are things going and ended without either of us saying what we actually meant.
And somewhere in the gap between the fourth acquisition and whatever was coming next, when the chaos had briefly settled into something resembling normal, a question surfaced that I could not push back down.
Why can't I just be happy.
Not asked dramatically. Not in a crisis. Just quietly, honestly, in a moment when the noise stopped long enough for something true to come through.
I had done everything I was supposed to do. Shown up for my people. Protected who I could. Navigated what was asked of me. And still the question came.
It took me a while to understand what it was really asking. It was not asking about my career. It was asking about the life happening in the margins of all that effort. The dinners missed. The recitals traveled through. The slow accumulation of small absences that nobody names until they add up to something larger.
The question was not ungrateful. It was honest. And honest questions, when you finally stop long enough to hear them, have a way of answering themselves.
The joy was gone.
Imported from Post Archives — POSTS FOR WEEK OF 06-08-26.docx