I Eat Leaves

May 22, 2026. My last day.

I was in the hallway when Brenda found me. That's how it started — not with a formal meeting request or a calendar invite, just a hallway encounter, the kind that feels accidental but isn't. She needed my keys and my computer. Those were the first words out of her mouth. Not "how are you feeling" or "it was good working with you." Keys and computer. We walked to my office together, and I started pulling keys off my ring one by one.

There is something about removing keys from a keyring that feels more final than almost anything else in a professional exit. A resignation letter is just words on a page. Cleaning out a desk is just logistics. But keys are physical proof that you belonged somewhere. You had access. You were trusted with the locks. And then, one Tuesday morning, you hand them back and you don't.

My emails were already set to forward to Brenda. She noted that almost as soon as we walked in. I'd done it myself, actually — set it up the night before because I knew it would need to happen and I didn't want to leave loose ends. That's the kind of person I am at work. Even on my way out the door, I'm making sure things are covered. The irony of that was not lost on me standing in that office, watching her check the screen.

The Click Factor

Brenda and I never clicked. I want to be honest about that because it matters more than most people in professional settings are willing to admit. She told me herself, right there near the end of our conversation: "We just didn't click together. I like you. We just really didn't click." And I believed her on both counts. She did like me, in the way that you can like someone while also finding them fundamentally difficult to be around in a supervisory context. And we genuinely did not click.

The click factor in management is real. It's not talked about enough in professional development circles, probably because it makes people uncomfortable. We want to believe that performance is measurable, that if you do the work well enough, the relationship with your supervisor will sort itself out. That's not always true. Sometimes two people simply operate on different frequencies, and no amount of professionalism or effort closes that gap.

What happens in those situations is that small things start to accumulate. Requests go unanswered. Emails get ignored. You ask for something reasonable — say, for someone to take handouts off your hands that are stacking up, or to move boxes out of the space where the baby measurement board needs to stand, or to arrange for the upholstered chairs in the waiting area to be cleaned because larger-bodied clients deserve a comfortable place to sit — and nothing happens. There's no response. No acknowledgment. No counter-proposal.

That last one bothered me more than the others, if I'm being honest. The upholstered chairs were genuinely uncomfortable for clients who carried more weight on their bodies, and WIC serves a lot of those clients. It wasn't a complicated ask. Clean the chairs or let me clean them. That's it. But it sat in my sent folder, unanswered, and eventually I stopped expecting a response. That's a particular kind of professional exhaustion — when you stop expecting to be heard.

I also asked about a training called "making the most of short appointments." The WIC appointment window is not long, and there is a real skill to compressing meaningful nutrition counseling into a brief interaction without making the client feel rushed or dismissed. I wanted that training. I thought it would make me better at my job. That request also went nowhere. No explanation, no alternative offered, just silence.

When you add those things up over time, they tell you something about the working relationship. Not that your supervisor is a bad person. Brenda wasn't a bad person. But the silence communicates a priority order, and you learn where you sit in it.

What the Exit Interview Actually Covered

Exit interviews in government-funded programs carry a specific bureaucratic weight that is different from a private sector departure. There are forms. There is language. There is a process that moves at its own pace regardless of what either party is actually feeling in the room. I sat through it and I answered honestly, which I think surprised Brenda a little.

I told her I was going to stick with WIC. I didn't want to lose the ground I'd gained with StarLINC — the technical system the clinic used for client records and appointment management. It was hard-earned knowledge. Only a couple of states even use StarLINC, which means proficiency in it is actually a differentiator. I had put real time into learning it, and I wasn't willing to walk away from that investment entirely. Moving into a program assistant role rather than leaving WIC altogether made sense for that reason.

But I was also honest about the other piece. The assistant manager, Sarah, had been adding to the workload in ways that I could feel piling up. Every new expectation she introduced took more time. I told her that directly — told Sarah that all the things she was asking me to do were going to require more time, and that the math wasn't working. I wasn't trying to be difficult. I was trying to be accurate. There are only so many minutes in an appointment, and if you keep adding requirements without removing anything, something is going to suffer.

The honest truth I had to sit with, though, was this: I left willingly because I wasn't confident I could do everything being asked of me. That's a hard thing to say out loud. It's harder to put in writing. But it's the truth, and I think it's more useful than pretending I left for purely strategic reasons. There was a performance gap, and I knew it, and I made a decision before that gap became the official story of how my time at the clinic ended.

The PIP Culture and What It Costs You

A Performance Improvement Plan sounds neutral. It sounds like support. The name implies that someone cares enough about your performance to help you improve it. In practice, a PIP is often a paper trail. It is documentation that the organization did its due diligence before a termination. It is, in many workplaces, the step before the end.

The emotional toll of being placed on a PIP is significant and largely invisible in professional literature. You are still showing up. You are still doing the work. But there is now a formal record of your deficiencies, reviewed on a schedule, with benchmarks you may or may not be able to hit. And if you don't hit them, the outcome was probably decided before the plan was ever written.

I knew enough to see it coming. The increasing demands, the missed communications, the general sense that the fit between me and the expectations of the role was getting worse instead of better — these were the warning signs. I could have waited. I could have let the process play out and seen whether a PIP materialized. But that would have meant letting someone else write the narrative of how I left.

Leaving voluntarily, before a PIP, is a form of professional self-preservation. It is not giving up. It is reading the room accurately and making a decision that protects your record. My resume does not have a PIP on it. My exit from the nutritionist position was my choice, documented as such, and I transitioned into a program assistant role within the same system. That is a very different story than being managed out.

I want to be clear that I'm not advising everyone to bail at the first sign of difficulty. Some performance gaps are fixable. Some supervisory conflicts can be resolved with a direct conversation. But there is a version of staying that is just delayed damage, and learning to tell the difference is a real professional skill. It takes more self-awareness than most of us are taught to develop.

The Strategic Departure

What I did on May 22nd had a shape to it, even if it didn't feel that way in the moment. Looking back, I can see it clearly: I aligned my exit with my values rather than waiting for the institution to define my departure for me.

Here's what that actually looks like in practice:

1. You identify the gap between what the role requires and what you can genuinely deliver, without self-deception in either direction.
2. You assess whether the gap is closable given the resources and support available to you, and you are honest about what support has not materialized.
3. You look at what you stand to lose by staying — your professional record, your confidence, your relationship with the work itself — and weigh that against what you stand to gain by transitioning.
4. You choose the exit that leaves you intact.

For me, that meant moving from nutritionist to program assistant. It meant keeping my connection to StarLINC and to WIC's mission, which I genuinely believed in. It meant not letting a failing fit become a failing record.

The transition memo I prepared for my successor was part of this too. It covered client care continuity — who was in the middle of a plan, what follow-ups were scheduled, what notes needed context. Nobody asked me to write it. I wrote it because the clients didn't do anything wrong, and their care shouldn't suffer because the professional situation around them had run its course. That instinct, the one that makes you write the memo nobody asked for, is worth paying attention to. It's a signal about what you actually value at work.

Gardening and Deer

Here is the part that stays with me.

After the keys were handed over and the computer had been logged out of my accounts and the exit interview questions had been answered, something shifted. Brenda asked me if I was going to plant a garden this year. She mentioned she had all kinds of things going on in her yard. Two deer had shown up the day before.

And just like that, we were two people talking about deer and gardens, not a supervisor and a departing employee navigating the last bureaucratic steps of a professional separation. It lasted maybe five minutes. It was easy in a way that most of our working relationship had not been.

I've thought about that conversation more than I expected to. What it illustrated is something that took me a while to fully accept: the professional version of a person and the human version are not always the same, and a difficult working relationship doesn't necessarily mean two people don't like each other. Brenda liked me. I think I liked her too, in that garden-and-deer, talking-over-a-fence kind of way. We just couldn't find that register in the context of the clinic, the appointments, the emails, the requests that went unanswered.

That duality is worth naming because it makes the whole experience less black and white. I didn't leave because Brenda was a bad manager or a bad person. I left because the fit was off, the demands were escalating, and I had enough self-awareness to know that staying wasn't going to fix either of those things. That's a more complicated story than "bad boss" or "I quit," and it's closer to the truth of how most professional departures actually happen.

What You Take With You

The values alignment question is one I think every person in a healthcare or social services setting should sit with regularly, not just when things are going badly. What do you actually value at work? Advocacy for clients? Technical mastery? Being heard by your supervisor? A workspace that functions? Write those things down. Then look honestly at how well your current environment supports each one.

If you do that audit and most of your values are getting a three or four out of ten, that's information. It doesn't automatically mean you should leave. But it means you're paying a price to stay, and you should at least know that you're paying it.

I walked out of that clinic on May 22nd with my keys no longer on my ring, my emails forwarding to someone else, and a five-minute conversation about deer in my head. I also walked out with my professional record intact, my knowledge of StarLINC preserved, and a clear sense of why I'd made the choices I made. That felt like enough. Some days it felt like more than enough.

Technical skill matters. Learning your systems, knowing your mission, doing the work carefully — all of that matters. But it doesn't matter more than knowing yourself well enough to recognize when a situation has stopped working and doing something about it before the situation does something about you first.