Job hopping was my coping mechanism

Every new job started the same way. First week: unstoppable, the new person with the energy, the ideas, the extra hours nobody asked for.

A new job was a novelty IV drip, and I was mainlining it. Unfamiliar systems, new faces, a clean slate: my brain ran on all of it.

Recruiters loved me in that phase, and honestly, so did I. It is easy to be impressive when everything is new.

Then, like clockwork, the new became the known. The systems were learned, the faces familiar, and the work revealed itself as the same Tuesday on repeat.

My performance did not gently decline. It fell off a cliff, and I watched it fall while feeling nothing but tired.

The scariest part was how invisible the slide was from the inside. I felt busy right up until I felt nothing.

• Deadlines I used to beat started beating me.
• Meetings I used to light up became meetings I survived.
• The guilt arrived long before the exit did.

For years I told a story about ambition, or bad luck, or terrible managers. Some of that was true. None of it explained the shape of the pattern.

Job hopping was my coping mechanism: a new job resets the shame clock. Nobody at the new place knows about the unanswered emails at the old place. For ninety days, I got to be the version of me I actually like.

The leaving was never really about the job. It was about outrunning the evidence, and the evidence always caught up.

I still change jobs more than most people, and I have made peace with that. What changed is that I stopped leaping blind.

• Will this work still interest me once it is familiar?
• Does the role have built-in variety, or one long middle?
• Am I running toward something, or just away from the shame?

That last question is the load-bearing one. If the answer is running away, no new job fixes it. I know, because I tried.

The checklist is not magic. It just forces the honest conversation to happen before the resignation letter instead of after.