How letting go feels

A few months ago, I was offered a role in the marketing team of a startup founded by my classmate and his friends. It sounded like an exciting opportunity to learn and grow.

What I didn't anticipate was that this experience would become one of the strongest tests of my personal values.

From early on, I noticed something deeply uncomfortable about the way people worked within the team.
There was an absence of basic professional courtesy.
People said whatever came to mind, with little regard for how their words landed on others.
Personal boundaries were treated as irrelevant.
Nobody's personal life, schedules, or priorities seemed to matter beyond what they could contribute to the company at any given moment.

My studies were my priority,
and I had been transparent about that from the very beginning.
Yet the expectation was that every free second I had belonged to the startup.
Meetings were scheduled at 11pm.
I was expected to respond to messages and calls the moment they came in, regardless of whether I was with my family or trying to catch up on coursework.
I had made it clear, more than once, that I would not be reachable after 10pm.
That boundary was never respected.

When I wasn't immediately available,
I would be tagged and called out in the group chat.
Made to feel irresponsible.
Publicly questioned on my leadership.
I raised my concerns multiple times.
Things would shift slightly for a few days before quietly drifting back to the same patterns.
It made me reflect on a difficult truth: speaking up is not always enough when the culture itself is unwilling to change.

Then one night,
after I had once again not joined a late meeting,
a series of messages came through on the group chat that crossed a line I hadn't seen coming.
In the middle of what had become a familiar pattern of guilt and pressure, the founder mentioned having suicidal thoughts.

I have some history with this.
Suicide has touched my life before, and certain things trigger a response in me that I cannot simply reason my way out of.
Those messages sent me into a panic attack.

I wrote my resignation and left that night.

A few days later, he approached me in person.
Not to acknowledge what had happened.
Not to check if I was okay. 

His first question was: "When are you joining back?"

I told him what those messages had done to me. His response was to ask me to forget about it and move on.

That was the moment I understood, fully and finally, that this was not a place that had room for people as whole human beings.

There is one more thing I have not been able to forget. The test I had been asking for time to prepare for... the one they wouldn't give me space to focus on... I failed it.

Leaving was not easy. There was guilt, a sense of abandoning something I had genuinely invested myself in.
But staying would have meant silently endorsing behaviour that went against everything I believe about how people deserve to be treated.

Walking away was, in itself, a moral choice.

This experience taught me that ethics is not always about grand dilemmas.
Sometimes it lives in the everyday... in how we speak to each other, in whether we honour someone's time, and in the quiet courage it takes to say this is not right, even when no one else seems to notice.