When the Spreadsheets Stopped Making Sense Vol. 19 — WordsByEkta🌿
When the Spreadsheets Stopped Making Sense
Although deep down I knew being a CA wasn't my forever calling, I genuinely loved working. I enjoyed every bit of it — experimenting with formulas in Excel, balancing trial balances, even setting up macros. It didn't matter what the task was; I loved the feeling of building something.
I'm not outgoing. I like being at home. But I've always needed my mind to stay engaged — working on a laptop, solving problems, creating systems. What I didn't want was to feel stamped into the corner of a room, reduced to someone who just exists between meals and milk bottles.
I left my last job after just eight months. Audit season had pushed me to work late nights — sometimes until midnight — and I did it without complaint. But when the rush ended, my boss began picking at small things. Not mistakes, just… friction. Enough for me to know he wanted me to leave on my own. So I did.
I remember walking out of that office one last time. I didn't cry. I didn't slam the door. I just felt strangely hollow, like a part of me had detached and was still sitting at that desk. The spreadsheets, the charts, the back-and-forth emails — all of it had been part of a rhythm I didn't know I'd miss so fiercely.
A month or so later, I had a baby. Then a few months slipped by in a blur of recovery, round-the-clock feeding, burping, lullaby singing, diapering, rocking her to sleep and doing it all over again. The days were long, the nights longer, and through it all, I felt like I was slowly vanishing beneath the weight of the routine. And somewhere in those soft, blurry days of feeding and rocking and watching the clock, a quiet emptiness began to rise.
I missed working. I missed feeling needed for something that didn't cry or spit up. I missed opening my laptop and feeling like I mattered.
I tried taking a class to improve my interpersonal skills. It was online, and I wore wired earphones so my daughter wouldn't wake from the sound. She was still little — too little to understand what I was doing or why I needed to do it.
One day, while I was deep into the session, she woke up. I noticed and quickly went to get her a toy or something to eat. I forgot I was still plugged in. When I returned, I saw the rubber tip of one of the earbuds was missing.
Panic.
I asked my husband if he'd seen it. We searched everywhere — the floor, her clothes, her mouth. Nowhere. We both slowly reached the same unspoken fear: had she swallowed it?
That night, after she slept and the house was quiet, I cried — not because of the shouting or the fear, but because something in me was beginning to wither.
I remember sitting in the dark, staring at the kitchen tiles, wondering if I was slowly dissolving into the background of my own life. There were no job titles now, no projects, no praise. Just tasks that reset every few hours — feeding, cleaning, soothing — like waves crashing endlessly onto shore. And yet, none of it felt visible. Not to the world. Sometimes, not even to myself.
I wasn't chasing ambition. I wasn't trying to climb a ladder or prove anything. I just wanted a piece of my mind to stay alive — some tiny part that still belonged to me.
My husband wasn't cruel. He was being practical, maybe even protective. One parent had to make the sacrifice, and between us, it had already been decided by default, not dialogue. Society has a way of making that choice for you.
I wasn't mad at him. I was mad at how invisible I felt.
There's a peculiar kind of grief that comes from being needed all the time but not for who you are — only for what you provide. It seeps in slowly, disguised as tiredness, then irritability, then numbness. You go from multitasking to merely surviving, and nobody seems to notice the difference.
So I began to write. Not to publish, not for a career — but to pour things out. The things I couldn't explain. The feelings that made no sense on paper but felt too big to carry around all day.
I wrote about my doubts, the quiet rage and quiet love that lived side by side. I never villainized my husband in those pages. He was doing what he thought was best. But I was finally doing something for myself, too.
Writing didn't fix my life. It just reminded me that I still had one.
Some days, I wrote only a paragraph. Some days, just a single line. But it was mine. It was untouched by anyone else's expectations or needs. It didn't require me to be "presentable" or "professional." It just needed me — raw, tired, and honest.
Now my daughter is older. A toddler with opinions and energy and eyes that notice everything. She's begun to recognize the laptop — not as a toy, but as the thing that takes me away from her. Sometimes, when I'm typing, she'll come over quietly and shut it. Just closes the lid gently, like she's reminding me where I'm needed.
And most days, I listen. I fold the moment into myself, pause the thought, the sentence, the scene. But inside, I mourn a little. Not because I don't want to be with her — I do — but because I want both. I want to be a present mother and a present self.
I'm learning that wanting both doesn't make me ungrateful — it makes me human. The world tells us to choose, to either be all in or not at all. But I'm trying to make space where both versions of me can exist: the woman who warms milk bottles and the one who warms stories into sentences. Some days I fail. But some days, I write. And that has to count for something.
That tension — the one between the world you're building for your child and the one you're still trying to build for yourself — it's constant. There's no template for this dual life. No manual that says, "Here's how to keep a part of yourself alive while giving your all to someone else." It's not something people prepare you for — the contradiction of being completely fulfilled and utterly lost at the same time.
And when I write now, it's often on my phone, stolen minutes here and there. But because it's a phone, it looks like I'm scrolling. So to others — even to my husband — it feels like I'm always "on the screen." It's hard to explain that this is work. It may not pay yet. But it's labor. It's effort. It's me trying to stay whole.
And I get it — from the outside, it doesn't look like much. But it's the foundation. Quiet, invisible, unpaid — but mine.
Sometimes, I imagine returning to a more "professional" world. Maybe a client, a consultancy role, maybe even a new kind of career altogether. But then I think about how much of myself I've poured into writing — not for applause, but for survival. And it feels just as valid.
I no longer have colleagues, meetings, or urgent emails. But I do have characters, memories, and paragraphs waiting to be shaped. That's something.
I didn't come to writing with a plan. I came to it because I needed air.
I didn't even know I had a voice until it began pouring out in the quiet moments — when the house was still, when the weight of "doing nothing" felt too loud.
This isn't the career shift I imagined. I never saw myself as "the writer." I was supposed to be working in ledgers and balance sheets. But words made space when life didn't. They gave me a way to stitch meaning into my days, to process what I couldn't always say aloud.
It's hard sometimes — to write in snatches, to be misunderstood, to explain to others (and to myself) that this invisible work matters. That even if no one sees it right now, I feel it.
Motherhood doesn't come with clean breaks. There is no office door to close. But with each sentence I type during nap time, with each note I draft on my phone at midnight, I'm building something. Not just a portfolio — but a version of me that didn't disappear.
Maybe someday my daughter will understand why I kept writing, even when it felt like no one was reading. Maybe she'll see that it's okay to want more than one version of yourself. And maybe, when she grows up, she won't think twice about claiming that space.
I didn't know I had a voice until it poured out when the house was still.
✍️ Written by WordsByEkta🌿
🖋️ Emotional Storyteller | Writing what hearts never say aloud
💌 If you connected with my way of saying hard truths — often overlooked but deeply felt — explore one of my free letters:
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