You used to carry everything.
If someone dropped the ball, you dove. If a decision seemed off, you rewound the conversation. If the roadmap got weird, you lit a candle and tried to debug strategy with your bare hands.
You didn’t do this because you’re a control freak.
You did it because you care.
You did the work, so you felt responsible. And because you’re good, people let you. Encouraged you, even.
You were the hero, the glue, the failsafe.
And now? You’re tired.
Not just “need a nap” tired. Existentially tired.
You see chaos, and your first thought isn’t “How do I fix this?”
It’s “Please, not me again.”
You’re not broken.
You’re just human.
And you’re not meant to carry all of it.
The Dysfunction: Carrying the Uncarryable
The dysfunction isn’t that you care.
It’s that you believe your care is required. That if you stopped holding things - people, systems, projects - they’d fall. And it would be your fault.
This is the unspoken pact of overfunctioners.
You overextend. They underworry. Everyone silently agrees to the terms.
Until one day you realize:
You’ve built a Rube Goldberg machine powered by your own burnout.
The Lie of Ownership
We worship “ownership” like it’s a holy word.
Take initiative. Own the problem. Be the person who steps up.
But no one tells you what happens when “owning” turns into hoarding.
When you mistake “this matters to me” for “this is mine alone to carry.”
When you start gatekeeping out of love. Or fear. Or both.
Ownership without boundaries doesn’t look like leadership.
It looks like control.
And control is not the same as clarity.
Shipped-Too-Soon Scars
You shipped something too fast because leadership was breathing down your neck.
You patched a critical bug at midnight because no one else could.
You ran interference between product and engineering so nobody else had to get yelled at.
And somewhere in there, you got good at it. Too good.
So good that people just stopped asking if you should carry it all.
And now?
Now when someone asks, “Can you take this on?” you don’t hear a question.
You hear a loyalty test.
You hear, “If you really cared, you’d say yes.”
That’s not teamwork.
That’s emotional blackmail in Agile clothing.
Sometimes the Best Decision Still Fails
You can do everything right.
You can gather context, loop in stakeholders, document every tradeoff, and still ship something that backfires.
Why?
Because some variables don’t show up until after the decision.
Because people change their minds.
Because two teams interpreted the same “approved plan” like it was abstract art.
Or maybe:
- Your PM left mid-quarter
- Your leadership changed direction
- The client misunderstood the spec, then blamed you for their misread
- The integration partner never shipped their part, and you took the heat
- The world shifted under your feet - and your “clean decision” now looks like a blind spot.
You didn’t screw up.
You just got hit by reality.
You Can’t Fix What You Don’t Control
You can only control how you show up.
You cannot control:
- Your CTO's shifting priorities
- The designer ghosting you mid-project
- A teammate who drops drama into Slack like it’s confetti
- The bug that wasn’t in staging but is very much in prod
And yet, you take all of it personally.
You wear other people’s decisions like name tags.
You mistake proximity for responsibility.
But you are not the product of your context.
You’re the pattern-breaker inside it.
And that starts by saying:
“This is not mine to hold.”
Process Trauma Is Real
You’ve been burned by systems that punished slowness, discouraged honesty, and handed out blame like Halloween candy.
So now you:
- Anticipate every concern before it's voiced
- Add 37 bulletproof caveats to every PR description
- Overexplain basic tradeoffs to protect your future self from critique
This isn’t maturity. It’s process PTSD.
And it teaches you to see work as a battlefield - even when the war is over.
Let yourself operate like the threat level has changed.
Because it probably has.
The Long Goodbye
Part of seniority is learning how to let go.
Not with a dramatic “I quit” - but with the quiet, grown-up courage of someone who knows:
- I can care without clutching
- I can lead without owning every outcome
- I can ship good work even if it dies in a strategy shift three weeks later
You are not your roadmap.
You are not your success metrics.
You are not the last person standing between your team and the abyss.
You are a steward.
You show up.
You do your part.
And when the baton passes - or the sprint implodes - you let it go.
One Last Time, for the People in the Back
Letting go doesn’t mean not caring.
It means caring cleanly.
Without ego.
Without martyrdom.
Without rewriting the outcome in your head a hundred times before bed.
You don’t need to be the hero.
You don’t need to be the shield.
You don’t need to be the emotional patch cable that holds the org together.
What you do need?
A nervous system that isn’t on fire.
Because the systems will change.
The roadmap will shift.
The features will get cut, merged, resurrected, rewritten, abandoned.
And if you’ve built your identity on holding everything together...
You’ll break right alongside it.
So breathe.
Step back.
Let the flame flicker out.
You’ve done enough.
Let it go.
Final Entry. Final Note.
This is article 21 in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Software Survival.
It’s also me taking my own advice—learning to let go, even when it’s hard.
(Yes, even when your brain whispers “just one more metaphor about code being feelings.”)
We started with a shipping mantra.
We’re ending with a peace mantra.
Somewhere in between, we built a map.
If even one piece helped you name a problem, survive a weird sprint, or feel less alone—then it did its job.
And when the seas get stormy again (they will), you’re allowed to come back.
This series was never a sermon. It’s a lighthouse.
You don’t need it all the time. Just when you need direction.
Keep going. Keep growing.
And don’t forget—you’re human first. Engineer second.
See you out there.