Closing My Own Open Tabs
I know how. I'm just not ready to.
A few weeks ago, I enrolled in MIT’s Introduction to Philosophy: God, Knowledge and Consciousness.
I dove into the first lecture headfirst, completing it early in the morning before my kids woke up over the course of a few days. Then I wavered. There were seventeen lectures left. Should I pay for the certificate and get my work graded, or continue with the free option? My delusion in hindsight is jarring. Time to finish a philosophy course, even the free version, was nonexistent. But for those few days that I lived in that fantasy, I felt a false sense of security that I must have needed to get through that week. The security of progress.
I completed one lecture, and haven’t been back. The course ends on Thursday. I keep the tab open anyway.
My life is full of this kind of clutter: unfinished courses, open browser tabs, stacks of unread books, and an inbox full of unopened newsletters.
From the outside, it looks like curiosity. From the inside, it is starting to feel like something else.
A coping mechanism to mask the discomfort of being still.
The discomfort of not doing, of not learning, growing, progressing, achieving.
That discomfort is especially present now. Last week, I announced to my colleagues and friends that I’m leaving the company I co-founded fourteen years ago. I’d been holding that information for six months — much longer if I count the time it lived only in my head. It’s not the moment to unpack that decision. It was made with more care and agony than I can convey in a parenthetical. But the announcement marks the end of an era, and once you’ve come to the end of something so intertwined with who you are, you feel both lost and loss. I’ve felt both over the past few years since selling, and worked through a lot of those feelings with coaches, journaling, and, more recently, hours of back and forth with my preferred LLM of the moment.
But where am I after all of this introspection? In many ways, I’m more lost than when I began.
Because each thread I pull, each tab I open, or book I buy, creates a clone. A near-identical version of myself that takes a slightly different path: the one who quotes philosophers, the one with the MBA, the one who builds more businesses, the one who doesn’t build anything and instead spends a year being fully present with her children. These versions are compounding. I can’t keep track of them all, and part of me doesn’t want to, because as long as they all exist as possibilities, I don’t have to choose. And choosing means closing doors. And closing doors means accepting one’s own mortality, that life is filled with more not-taken paths than taken ones, and somehow making peace with that.
While building my business, I had focus. More than naturally comes to me, thanks in part to a cofounder who held me accountable. I ignored the shiny objects and rarely bought new books. The build was all-consuming, to a fault. I nurtured nothing else. But the focus had its rewards. The business grew, succeeding by all external standards. I might have created a prison in some ways, and I certainly felt trapped at times, but I was wildly productive. I knew who I was because the goal was movement and I didn’t stop moving.
Now, faced with the uncertainty of not knowing what comes next, I’m overwhelmed. Who am I without external measures of success? Without checklists of productivity? Will I even get the chance to find out, or will I fill the space before the question has time to breathe?
Because the day I leave work, I’ve already manufactured productivity.
Welcome to “Mommy Camp,” what I’ve named my decision not to send the kids to their school’s camp this summer, and to stay home with them instead. In some ways, it’s a beautiful decision; the kids are beyond excited. In others, it’s pure self-sabotage. No break, no uncertainty, instead a summer curriculum, personalized learning paths, custom T-shirts, and knock-off Boy Scouts badges.
Fast-forward to fall, when the kids go back to school, and my sabbatical begins. But don’t worry, I have a plan for that too. An extensive reading list, multiple courses of study, new business endeavors, personal travel plans, recipes to try, and more. Fifteen check boxes. All exciting, meaningful, fulfilling in their own ways.
I wrote a Toolkit about this recently, because I know how to give advice on too many open tabs. I teach the audit, the categories, the matrix. I know how to close them, intellectually.
Emotionally? My tabs are my security blanket right now. And two weeks after publishing that piece, I’m still holding it tight.
What I have clear: I want to have impact. I want to serve. I’d like to help women navigate the exact kind of transition I’m in, the reevaluation of priorities and values that comes with age and experience. The whole premise is outward-facing. My next decade will be spent in the service of something larger.
But right now, in this specific window, I’m not serving anyone. Instead, I’m searching, reading, pulling threads. I’m feeding documents about myself into a Claude project in hopes it turns into some sort of oracle. I’m writing essays about my own inner life. I’m taking personality assessments and reading the results like horoscopes, hoping each one will reveal the thing that finally makes it click.
It’s all about me. And it honestly feels selfish.
Last week, out on a walk, my mind wandered. As it often does lately, my hand went to my phone. Claude was out of tokens, so I opened ChatGPT and started asking whether introspection is fundamentally ego-driven.
My whole thesis in recent years has been that introspection is deeply beneficial, that if more people looked inward and did the inner work, the world would be better for it.
I still believe that.
But out on a walk on a beautiful spring day analyzing whether my self-analysis was selfish, I had to stop and look at what I was doing: rejecting the silence, unable to sit with my wandering mind. I had the illusion of conversing with someone, but was very much alone.
The introspection that I’ve made central to my identity in recent years, that I’ve built potential businesses around, that I write about on Sundays since the start of the year — right now, for me, it’s also avoidance. It looks like depth, but it functions like delay. It keeps me from sitting still long enough to feel what’s actually there: loss, the unmooring of an identity I held for fourteen years, grief for something I chose to end, and the fear that what comes next won’t match what came before, or worse, that I won’t be able to build anything meaningful again.
A few days later, an essay landed in my inbox that named the mechanism I’d been circling. The writer argues that wanting, the condition of striving for something you haven’t yet reached, is for a certain type of person the primary medium of feeling alive. And that having or arriving is a kind of ending.
If I’ve already arrived, already built and scaled and sold, what is left? The tabs, the courses, the AI conversations, the personality tests. They keep the wanting alive. They keep me on the verge. And being on the verge, it turns out, is a place I’ve made very comfortable.
So where is the sweet spot? I know that transitions often need space more than structure. That the whole point of a sabbatical is to not have a plan, to follow curiosity, to let things emerge. I’ve read the books about this. I’ve coached other people through it. I can say all the right things about surrendering to the process.
And yet everything in me is fighting against it.
Because surrendering to the process means tolerating the gap between deciding to leave and knowing what comes next. Between the identity I’ve held for fourteen years and the one that hasn’t formed yet. So I open another tab. Chat through another business idea with Claude or ChatGPT. Download a form for an MBA.
Don’t get me wrong, my natural curiosity and love of learning aren’t a bad thing. They’re the things I love most about myself. But right now, they’re also covering up the opportunity to sit with discomfort. And I suspect that’s where I’ll learn the most.
Last week, I didn’t write this essay. The thoughts were there, circling, but they wouldn’t converge. My instinct was to force it — to open a new tab and build scaffolding around the absence. Instead, I closed the laptop.
I didn’t have any revelation in the not doing. No space opened up. No perfect moment arrived that I otherwise would have missed.
I feel most alive when I’m building. Sitting still is uncomfortable.
Last week, I didn’t write.
This week, I did.
I’m not sure which one was movement.
Lauren, that so-called phase you are experiencing and writing about is not a phase. It’s evolution. Your personal evolution and, got to tell you, it continues. There’s no end period, only a continuation in perhaps different phases. You’re fortunate to feel such restless confusion, a type of creativity itself. I will keep an eye on you as you move through these strange and weirdly complex and frustrating phases.
I'm in a phase not unlike yours and have to remind myself to sit on my hands every once in a while. It's jarring to suddenly have a whole day in front of you. But I know you, and I know you deserve a break to be with your kids, to regroup and to be onto the next thing.