This afternoon, my supervisor finally formally replied to HR and the plant manager with my resignation application.
Actually, this application had been stuck for four days.
According to company procedure, after HR receives the resignation application, the supervisor has three days to conduct an interview and attempt to retain the employee. Only after confirming the outcome will it proceed to the next level for approval. My supervisor really wanted me to stay, so the process dragged on for four full days until it was finally sent out today.
I had less than one year of seniority, so legally I only needed a ten-day resignation notice period to leave. But in the end, I stayed a few extra days to make the work handover smoother. Looking back now, I actually regret it a bit, because I really wanted to get out of this place as soon as possible.
Starting today, colleagues gradually found out about my resignation.
Many people who saw me would ask, “Are you okay?”
Everyone knew I was busy, knew my workload was heavy, and knew I had been under attack from all sides during this period. I had to handle production line issues, often take on tasks that the supervisor should have coordinated, deal with uneven work distribution among colleagues, and even spend a lot of time helping colleagues without production control experience understand the work logic.
They all saw these things.
But very few people knew that what truly exhausted me wasn’t just the work.
It was that I didn’t want to go to work every day.
It wasn’t the occasional Monday blues everyone gets, nor was it simply feeling that work was annoying. Just thinking about having to go to work the next day made me start resisting it in my heart.
At my previous company, I almost never took leave. Even when menstrual cramps were unbearable, I would take painkillers and keep working. For colds or fevers, as long as I wasn’t too sick to move, I still showed up. But after joining this company, I kept thinking every day, “If only I got sick today,” because being sick would give me a legitimate reason not to come in.
Later the situation got worse. At first, I just couldn’t sleep well on Sunday nights; my mind wouldn’t stop when I thought about going to work the next day. Gradually, the anxiety started creeping in on Saturday nights. Sometimes I would lie in bed unable to sleep and could only silently cry.
I even seriously considered whether I should see a psychiatrist.
I used to think I had good stress tolerance, but now I realize that even people who can handle pressure have their limits.
Humans aren’t made of iron.
All along, I kept telling myself to try a little harder, to hold on a bit longer—maybe things would slowly improve.
But when an environment makes you doubt your own abilities over the long term, drains your emotions, takes away your sleep, and even makes you start hoping you’ll get sick just to rest, the problem probably isn’t the work itself anymore. It’s that the environment has already exceeded what you can handle.
Today when I talked about this with a few colleagues, they all said they understood.
Because they knew I hadn’t suddenly become fragile—I had simply held on for too long. Leaving wasn’t because I wasn’t trying hard enough or because my stress tolerance was poor. It was because I wanted to get myself back, to get the old fiery version of myself back.
I used to think resigning was giving up, but for me now, leaving a toxic environment isn’t running away—it’s giving myself a chance to live properly again. A truly healthy job shouldn’t make someone who never liked taking leave start hoping every day that they’ll get sick.