They keep telling me I'm about to be free. I have never felt less like it.

I keep being told I am on the verge of freedom. The tools will do the heavy lifting; the week will shrink; the afternoon will open up. I read it again in the same week my team got an email with the word "restructure" in the second paragraph, and I lay awake doing the only arithmetic that matters in this house — the mortgage against a number I am no longer sure of.

That is the thing nobody selling the freedom seems to have felt. The promise lands in a body that is already braced. You are told to look forward to your liberated time, and what you feel instead is the cold little drop when a calendar invite appears with no agenda, the way you now read every company-wide email twice.

I am not going to perform gratitude for a gift that arrives as a risk. And I am not going to pretend the fear is not there, because pretending is its own kind of tax. So I will do the smaller, truer thing the evening allows, which is to name it. Tonight I felt the pressure, not the freedom. I suspect you did too. That is not nothing to say out loud — it might even be the beginning of asking who decided it should feel this way.