They offered me $30,000 to walk away

Happy Sunday 🌿

In February, we turn our hearts toward forgiveness: forgiving others and learning how to live with peace and joy in our hearts. This month is about noticing the burdens we carry, often without realizing it.

Scripture for the Week

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.”
Matthew 5:6

Let’s Get Real

They offered me $30,000 to walk away and never speak about it again.

All I had to do was sign the severance agreement.

No appeal.
No lawsuit.
No explanation.
No revisiting what happened.

Just take the money and move on.

It seemed like the obvious choice.
A clean exit.
A fresh start.

But inside, something felt deeply unsettled.

I believed I had been treated unfairly.
I knew my performance wasn’t the issue, I had been too outspoken about certain internal practices.

And signing that agreement felt like compromising my integrity.

So I refused the money.

I chose to fight.
To take a stand.
To uphold my values.

I hired an attorney.
I gathered documents.
I prepared to prove I was right.

What I didn’t understand then was the cost.

Not just the financial cost of attorney fees.

There was also the cost of my time. 

Replaying the story over and over in my mind.
Collecting documentation. Losing sleep at night.

And there was the emotional cost of carrying resentment, anger, and self-righteousness.

Being a victim becomes a heavy burden.

And in the end…I lost.

The case.
The severance money.
The chance to prove I was right.

I didn’t lose because I was wrong.
I lost because the world isn’t always fair.

My state has an “employee at will” policy. A company can terminate an employee at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all.

After eight months of inner turmoil, the mediator simply closed the case.

I had proven nothing.
Healed nothing.
Exposed nothing.

All I was left with was resentment.

A weight I carried forward into the next chapter of my life.

I can see now what I couldn’t see then.

While I was busy fighting that company, another door opened.

I was offered a position at a startup technology company.

Better pay.
More autonomy.
No hierarchy of executives with inflated egos.

That new role awakened something in me: creativity, energy, possibility.

For the first time, I experienced what it felt like to work without layers of control or constant approval.

It ignited my passion for entrepreneurship and freedom.

So the great news is that I moved on from the corporate world.

But the bad news is, I didn’t move on from the resentment.

It stayed with me. I buried it and carried on.

And that, I would later learn, was the real cost.

On the outside, I thrived.

But years later, that unresolved pain would rear it's ugly head.

Another story coming soon…

A Great Question for You

When has holding on to being right cost you your peace? What resentment might you still be carrying?

Wellness Wisdom

I was holding on to stress.

My life looked great on the outside. In the midst of the dot-com boom years, I was thriving in business and keeping a busy travel schedule.

And I was always looking for ways to feel better on the inside.

But all that travel meant eating out constantly, an inconsistent sleep schedule, very little exercise, and plenty of cocktail parties and late-night business events.

I was having “fun,” but my back was killing me.

At the time, I didn’t connect any of this to what I was carrying emotionally. I thought living the good life would somehow take away the pain.

It would take years for me to realize that the body keeps its own records.

In the weeks ahead, I’ll continue to share short reflections on how staying conscious of the connection between body, mind, and soul means everything for overall well-being.

Prospering with Purpose

I love the book, Sermon on the Mount by Emmet Fox. In it, he reflects on the scripture passage above by re-framing righteousness as right thinking.

He teaches that when our thoughts are ordered rightly, our outer world eventually follows.

As within, so without.

While I was fighting to prove I was right on the outside, my thinking on the inside was stuck in resentment.

My thoughts were consumed by injustice, blame, and justification. I had a victim mindset. Even as new opportunities opened and my career moved forward, my inner world was still in turmoil.

Fox reminds us that our circumstances are often not the cause of our suffering, they are the expression of our inner state.

When we hunger and thirst for right thinking, we can get beyond life not being fair. Because our goal is to be filled - with peace, love and joy.

And filled with the freedom that comes when our inner world is no longer at war.

This is where peace truly begins.

In His Love,
Janet

If something here resonated with you, hit reply, I’d love to hear from you.