When a Paycheck Costs Your Peace
Every morning, we dress up ourselves, lock away our souls, and head to work.
Time to clock in. Not just with our hands—but with our silence.
We do the job; here’s the checklist:
Smile at the boss.
Answer emails.
Sit through strategy meetings that gut us slowly.
File reports we don’t believe in.
Write grant proposals in languages that don’t know how to hold our grief.
It’s a strange kind of exile, the one where you’re still in your body, but your spirit has moved out. We don’t talk about this enough. That slow suffocation. It’s that feeling that makes your doctor drown in a bottle of Jack Daniels at the end of his shift; he’s human, too! That ache you can’t trace back to anything specific.
That numbness that settles after years of saying “just for now,” until “just” becomes a lifestyle. You know that piece of duct tape you put to hold the thing together until the repairman came, and 5 years later, you say, “I bought it like that”?
We weren’t always like this.
Once, there was fire, a purpose. We entered these roles as teachers, doctors, activists, and artists, not for comfort but because we believed.
But belief doesn’t pay the rent. It’s the story of that old Gwen Guthrie song “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ on But The Rent.”
And so, belief is the first thing to go.
Now, we get praised for our professionalism, which usually just means:
“Look how well they’ve buried their conscience.”
That’s the real job description in many places.
Be brilliant but agreeable.
Be ethical but not inconvenient.
Be radical, but only on weekends (and make sure we don’t find out).
So we perform.
We become masters of “managing perceptions.”, in fact, the saying now is “perception is reality”.
We say, “I’m just doing my job,” as if that lets us off the hook.
We applaud the bold in public but call them foolish in private.
We watch someone say the thing we’re all thinking, and we look away.
And of course, there is the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) greeted with nods accompanied by the professional “I concur”, “we’re in alignment”, ...
Because we’ve learned that the paycheck is the leash.
Speak too honestly, and it might slip.
Say too much, and you might lose everything.
And that fear?
It’s real.
School fees are real.
Rent is real.
Responsibility is heavy.
But so is regret.
So is watching your soul shrink until it no longer fits in your chest.
This is what exile feels like:
Not fleeing your country but feeling foreign inside your own work.
Not losing your language, but being unable to use it where it matters most.
Not being gagged, but gagging yourself every day to “protect your future.”
And here’s what makes it worse, we feel alone.
We think we’re the only ones editing Truth; The only ones pretending to care in meetings; The only ones caught between values and invoices.
In the spirit of comfort in numbers, we’re not alone in this. This is a collective condition, not a personal failure, and once we name it, everything starts to shift.
We can begin to ask:
What would it take to speak, even a little, even just once?
What small Truth can I unhide today?
What kind of dignity is worth more than comfort?
Because peace isn’t just silence. Peace is alignment.
And if your job is pulling your soul in one direction and Truth in another, then that’s not peace. That’s quiet torment.
It starts small.
Maybe you ask the uncomfortable question in the meeting.
Maybe you protect the intern who’s still whole.
Maybe you say, “I’m not okay with this,” even if your voice trembles.
And maybe—just maybe—that’s when your soul starts to clock back in.