My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
The Bath I Took the Night I Quit My Job
By Jenna, 38 — Chicago, IL
I handed in my resignation letter at 4:47 p.m. on a Wednesday. I know the exact time because I stared at the clock on my office wall for a full ninety seconds after I set the envelope on my managing partner’s desk, and the second hand moved like it was dragging something heavy behind it. He didn’t open it while I stood there. He just looked at me over his reading glasses and said, “You’re sure?” and I said, “Yes,” and my voice didn’t shake, which surprised me more than anything else that happened that day.
I’d been a corporate attorney for eleven years. Eleven years of billable hours and conference calls that could have been emails and gray suits I bought in sets of three from the same store on Michigan Avenue. Eleven years of telling myself that the tightness in my chest every Sunday night was just ambition. That the migraines were just stress. That the fact that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt genuinely relaxed wasn’t a red flag — it was a badge of honor.
I drove home that evening in rush-hour traffic on the Kennedy Expressway, and for the first time in years, I didn’t care that it was bumper-to-bumper. I didn’t have a brief to finish. I didn’t have a client calling me at nine p.m. I didn’t have to be anywhere at all, and the enormity of that sat in my passenger seat like a person I hadn’t met yet.
The Quiet After
My apartment was dark when I got home. I dropped my bag by the door — the leather tote I’d carried for six years, heavy enough to leave a permanent ache in my left shoulder — and I just stood there in the hallway for a while. The radiator clicked. The neighbor’s dog barked once, then stopped. The fridge hummed.
I didn’t feel triumphant. I didn’t feel free. I felt the way you feel after you’ve been holding your breath underwater and you finally break the surface — gasping, disoriented, not sure which direction is shore.
My phone was already filling up with texts. My mother: “Call me.” My best friend Dara: “WHAT. Call me immediately.” My ex-boyfriend, who somehow always knew when something was happening in my life: “Heard through the grapevine. You okay?” I turned the phone face-down on the kitchen counter and opened the cabinet above the stove, where I kept a bottle of wine I’d been saving for something. I poured a glass. Then I walked into the bathroom and turned on the faucet.
I should tell you something about my bathtub. It’s the reason I rented this apartment. It’s one of those old claw-foot tubs, deep and wide, with slightly stained porcelain and brass fixtures that have gone green in places. When I first toured the apartment, the realtor apologized for the bathroom — said the building was pre-war, said they were planning to renovate. I told her if they touched that tub, I’d find somewhere else to live. She laughed. I wasn’t joking.
But here’s the thing: I almost never used it. Eleven years of sixty-hour weeks and I showered like I was putting out a fire — quick, efficient, already mentally composing emails before I’d reached for the towel. The tub was a luxury I paid rent for and never claimed. It sat there, beautiful and empty, like so many things in my life.
Filling Up
That night, I filled it all the way. I mean all the way — up to where the overflow drain starts to catch. I found an old jar of bath salts under the sink, a gift from some holiday exchange I couldn’t even remember, and poured the whole thing in. The water turned slightly milky, and the bathroom started to smell like eucalyptus, sharp and clean, the way I imagine the air smells in places I’ve never been.
I undressed slowly, which is not something I normally do. I normally undress the way I do everything — fast, goal-oriented, minimal wasted motion. But that night I unbuttoned my blouse one button at a time and let it fall on the tile floor and didn’t pick it up. I unclipped my hair and felt it hit my shoulders. I looked at myself in the mirror, really looked, and saw someone I almost recognized — tired around the eyes, a little thinner than she should be, but standing up straight for the first time in months.
The water was almost too hot when I got in. I lowered myself slowly, one inch at a time, hissing through my teeth. And then I was in, and the water was up to my collarbones, and the heat was everywhere, and something in my chest just — released. Like a fist unclenching. Like a door swinging open that I’d thought was painted shut.
I cried. Not delicately, not cinematically. I cried the way you cry when you’ve been storing it in your body for years and your body finally decides it’s done holding it for you. Big, ugly, shoulder-shaking sobs that echoed off the tile. I cried about the job and I cried about the years and I cried about the version of myself who’d walked into that law firm at twenty-seven with a ponytail and a new briefcase and no idea how much of herself she was about to trade away.
Something Shifted
After the crying stopped, there was this silence. Not empty silence — full silence. The kind where you can hear your own pulse in your ears and the water lapping gently against porcelain when you breathe. I lay there and let the heat work its way into my joints, my lower back, the place between my shoulder blades where I carry everything.
I sipped my wine. I watched the steam curl toward the ceiling. And I started to notice things — the way the light from the one candle I’d lit made shadows move on the wall like something alive. The way my skin looked underwater, wavering and soft. The way my body, stripped of its blazer and its posture and its professional armor, was just a body. Mine. Not the firm’s, not my clients’, not the version of myself I performed for twelve hours a day. Just mine.
I reached for the small device I kept in the cabinet beside the tub — something a friend had given me months ago, half as a joke, half as an intervention. I’d used it once, maybe twice, always rushed, always with one ear listening for my phone. But that night there was no phone. There was no tomorrow morning. There was just hot water and candlelight and the strange, tentative permission I was giving myself to feel something good after so long.
And I did. I felt something good. Not electric, not dramatic — something warmer than that. Something that started in my body and moved upward into my chest and settled there like a small flame. It was the first time in longer than I want to admit that I’d experienced pleasure without guilt trailing right behind it. Without a voice in my head calculating how many hours of sleep I was losing, how early the alarm was set, how much I still had to do.
There was nothing left to do. And so I just lay there, in the cooling water, and let myself feel it all the way through.
Tuesday Nights
That was five months ago. I’m still figuring out what comes next — I’ve been doing some consulting, thinking about legal aid work, learning to cook things that aren’t eaten standing over the sink at eleven p.m. Some days the freedom feels exhilarating. Some days it’s terrifying. I won’t pretend I don’t wake up at three a.m. sometimes, heart pounding, thinking about my savings account and my health insurance and all the things I’m supposed to want that I walked away from.
But every Tuesday night, I take a bath. Dara started calling it my ritual after I told her about it, and now she does the same thing at her place in Pilsen, and sometimes we text each other from our respective tubs — just a single word, usually “in,” which means, “I’m here, I’m doing this, I’m not answering emails.” It’s become the thing I look forward to most each week. Not because anything extraordinary happens, but because it’s the one time I consistently choose myself without apology.
I light the same candle. I use the same bath salts — I buy them now, a big jar from a shop on Clark Street. I pour a glass of whatever’s open. And I sink into that old claw-foot tub and let the water hold me up while I practice not holding anything at all.
What I Know Now
Here’s what I’ve learned, which isn’t much, but it’s mine: your body keeps a record of every hour you refuse to rest. Every lunch you skip. Every Sunday night you spend with your jaw clenched, dreading Monday. It stores all of it, and then one day it presents you with the bill.
My body’s bill came in the form of migraines and insomnia and a jaw so tight my dentist asked if I was grinding through concrete. I paid it off the only way I knew how — by stopping. By filling a bathtub. By giving myself one night a week where the only item on my agenda was warmth.
I don’t know what my life looks like in a year. I don’t know if I’ll go back to law or do something else entirely. But I know that when I’m an old woman, I won’t remember the briefs I filed or the depositions I sat through. I’ll remember that Wednesday in November when I drove home with nothing in front of me and ran a bath and cried and then, in the quiet after, found something I’d misplaced so long ago I’d forgotten I ever had it.
Myself, I think. I found myself. Or at least the part of me that knows how to be still.
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