A death in the family knocked school off the schedule.
I had only recently started classes, and I was already behind. Work had been relentless. Travel and the Amsterdam data-center build had eaten whole days. The leadership situation at Reality Check was changing. I was also making a job decision and trying to keep a new business moving.
Then somebody in the family died.
There was no clever productivity system that was going to fix the semester. I wrote to Baker and asked to withdraw from my classes.
I did not like doing it. Going back to school mattered to me precisely because my career had never followed the conventional sequence. I had learned by taking things apart, getting hired, building systems, breaking systems, and figuring out what came next. School was a chance to put some structure around that experience.
But wanting something did not make the hours appear.
Neither did guilt.
The honest choice was to stop, deal with the life directly in front of me, and try again later. Dragging the classes behind me while pretending I could catch up would only make a hard period worse.
That same day, another part of life moved forward: I accepted the Shutterstock job.
It was a strange split screen. One plan stopped. Another started. Grief sat in the middle of both.
Some weeks are like that. Nothing resolves into a tidy lesson. You make the least bad call, tell the truth about what you can carry, and keep moving.