Every Wednesday, Kionna is telling the truth about what it actually cost to leave — the parts that don't make it into the photos. This is Part 2.

My body knew first.

My palms were sweaty. My heart was beating faster. My stomach had that queasy, uneasy feeling that says, Oh shit. Something bad is about to happen.

I know anxiety pretty well. Over the years, I have learned the warning signs in my own body. I know what it feels like when my nervous system starts sounding the alarm. And that day, the alarm was definitely going off.

Honestly, though, work had already been feeling strange for a while.

I worked on a small team of peers, and relationships had started getting uncomfortable. There had been tension with coworkers. That very morning, I had to tell someone directly that I did not appreciate the way she was speaking to me. I had already brought some of those concerns to my manager.

There was also tension with another coworker, someone I had once considered a good friend. Our relationship had deteriorated after problems at work, and overall, I had reached the point where logging in every day felt heavy.

I was starting to dread work.

I had to intentionally remind myself:

I am not here for these people. I am here for the members.

That kept me going for a while.

Then Human Resources sent me a Teams message asking to meet.

I looked over at my wife, Cam, and said, "I have a bad feeling about this."

She looked worried.

I was worried too.

At the time, I was carrying the household financially. Losing my income was not some minor inconvenience. There was rent. Food. Medication. Visa expenses. School. Bills. Everyday life.

People romanticize moving abroad sometimes like you pack a suitcase, sit beside a volcano, drink something tropical, and all your responsibilities disappear.

They don't.

You still have to eat.

You still have bills.

You still have people depending on you.

You still need money.

So when HR asked to meet with me, my mind knew the possibilities.

HR usually does not randomly message you because they want to see how your morning is going.

When I entered the meeting, there were two people there, including the CEO.

Immediately, I knew.

Still, somehow, I was smiling.

"Hey. What's going on?"

Then they said it.

IT had brought it to their attention that I was living outside of the United States.

I remember responding:

"Oh, really?"

And then there was silence.

A long, awkward silence.

I didn't explain.

I didn't argue.

I didn't ask who told them.

I didn't demand proof.

I didn't start negotiating.

I didn't say shit.

They told me they were going to have to let me go because I had violated company policy.

I said:

"Okay."

That meeting was probably five minutes long.

And just like that, I was fired.

I looked at Cam afterward and said, "Well, I just got fired."

And then something happened that I did not expect.

I felt free.

That is probably the best way I can describe what was going through my head.

Oh shit, I'm fired.

And almost simultaneously:

Oh shit, I'm free.

For months, I had been carrying a secret.

I had relocated outside of the United States while working a job that required me to remain in the country.

I knew there was risk involved.

I made the decision anyway.

And suddenly, the secret was no longer mine to carry.

There was no more pretending.

No more carefully deciding what I could say.

No more feeling like some double agent living two different lives.

They knew.

I knew they knew.

It was over.

And instead of feeling devastated, I felt light.

Days afterward, I still felt light.

That surprised me.

Of course, there were practical concerns. I thought about my last paycheck. I thought there might be severance. I thought I might qualify for unemployment. I knew I had school financial aid coming. I started mentally rearranging resources and thinking about how we would survive.

But I did not immediately decide that my life was falling apart.

One of the things I have learned through my own mental-health journey is how distorted thinking can shape the way we experience difficult situations.

There is labeling.

I got fired, therefore this is bad.

There is catastrophizing.

I lost my job, therefore everything is about to fall apart.

Then there is black-and-white thinking.

This must either be the worst thing that happened to me or some amazing blessing in disguise.

But life has a whole lot of gray.

Losing my job created financial uncertainty.

And I felt free.

I experienced betrayal.

And I gained clarity.

I lost traditional security.

And I gained space to imagine something different.

All of those things can exist at once.

I didn't need to decide immediately whether getting fired was "good" or "bad."

It happened.

That was enough.

Sometimes we judge an experience before we have lived long enough to understand what it means.

I have experienced things in my life that felt horrible in the moment, only to look back years later and realize they redirected me somewhere I needed to go.

An old manager once gave me an analogy that stayed with me.

Maybe losing my job was another pull backward.

At the time, I did not know.

And that was okay.

Let me make something very clear.

Losing that job never made me regret leaving the United States.

Not for five minutes.

I stand ten toes down on that decision.

I have experienced too much beauty, freedom, growth, adventure, and life since leaving to pretend otherwise.

Were there consequences?

Absolutely.

Did I knowingly take a risk?

Absolutely.

Did one of those risks eventually catch up with me?

Clearly.

Accountability means I can say all three of those things without rewriting history.

I broke a workplace rule.

My employer responded.

Those were the consequences.

That does not mean I suddenly believe leaving was the wrong decision for my life.

Sometimes choosing yourself comes with a price.

You simply have to decide whether you are willing to pay it.

For me, the reward has outweighed the cost.

Getting fired itself was not what made me the angriest.

The betrayal did.

Later, I learned that someone had reported information about me.

I strongly believed I knew who it was because very few people had been trusted with that information, and there had already been tension between us.

That hurt more than losing the job.

Nobody likes feeling stabbed in the back by someone they once trusted.

And because we worked in the peer community, it bothered me on another level.

Peer work comes from lived experience.

People become peer specialists and recovery professionals because they have lived through something themselves. Mental-health struggles. Substance-use recovery. Trauma. Rock bottom. Rebuilding.

There is something about that shared lived experience that, at least to me, creates a responsibility to remember the humanity in other people.

That does not mean protecting someone from every consequence.

Sometimes accountability is necessary.

Sometimes reporting something is necessary.

But I believe there is a difference between accountability and intentionally trying to hurt someone.

I experienced what happened to me as retaliation.

That was difficult to swallow.

I remember being angry and thinking:

Damn. I got under your skin that badly?

But something else happened that showed me how much I had grown.

I didn't retaliate.

I didn't send a message.

I didn't call.

I didn't confront anybody.

I didn't demand an explanation.

I didn't try to get even.

I said nothing.

And sometimes saying nothing says everything.

Eventually, my anger shifted into something closer to pity.

Because if your response to conflict is to intentionally try to knock another person down, especially when your profession is supposedly about helping people stand back up, then that tells me something about where you are.

I don't have to fight you.

I can keep building.

I am not going to pretend I became some completely enlightened human being who never had another petty thought.

Please.

I am still me.

There is absolutely a part of me that thinks:

I want my name on things.

I want to build something meaningful.

I want to create something that helps people.

I want somebody who doubted me, betrayed me, underestimated me, or thought they ended my story to eventually look up and say:

"Damn. She really did the damn thing."

But I do not want revenge badly enough to destroy myself chasing it.

There is a difference.

I believe in transmuting energy.

Anger is energy.

Pain is energy.

Betrayal is energy.

Frustration is energy.

I can spend that energy arguing with somebody from my past, or I can put it into school.

I can put it into writing.

I can put it into building a business.

I can put it into creating.

I can put it into becoming someone I am proud of.

That is a much better return on investment.

Losing that job also made me reconsider how I want to be of service.

I love helping people.

That part has never changed.

But I started questioning whether I wanted to continue helping people through the same kind of system.

There is paperwork.

There are metrics.

There are policies.

There are organizational politics.

There are companies that talk constantly about mental health, compassion, recovery, and humanity while employees can still feel like numbers inside the organization.

That contradiction stayed with me.

At the end of the day, businesses need to make money.

I understand that.

But people are still people.

The employee sitting in front of you has a whole life outside of whatever role they perform for your company.

They have rent.

Medication.

Children.

Partners.

Debt.

Trauma.

Dreams.

Fear.

Responsibilities you know absolutely nothing about.

The world is already difficult enough.

If anything, that job showed me everything I do not want my own business to become.

I want to build something where service is authentic.

Yes, I believe my purpose can pay me.

Yes, businesses need revenue.

But I never want to lose sight of the human beings behind the numbers.

A few months before losing my job, I remember talking with my personal growth coach while I was still living in Colombia.

I told her I wanted to become more disciplined.

That word stayed with me.

Discipline.

At the time, I probably thought discipline meant becoming better at doing everything I was supposed to do.

Now I understand it differently.

Discipline becomes especially important when nobody is forcing you to do anything.

I am unemployed.

So I have to show up anyway.

That is discipline.

Losing my job showed me resilience, but it also showed me maturity.

I learned that somebody can hurt me and I do not have to hurt them back.

I learned that I can sit in uncertainty without automatically assuming the worst.

I learned that traditional security might not mean as much to me as freedom does.

And I learned that freedom requires work.

A lot of it.

K Redd, Arequipa

Part 3 of The Uncomfortable Truth drops next Wednesday. If this is the first thing of ours you've read, Sovereign Sundays goes out every Sunday.