What the two years before the ending does to you

The message came on the second day back from Christmas. Discord. Short. Done.

My first feeling was relief.

Not dread, not grief, not the complicated mix you're supposed to feel when a job ends. Just relief. Something lifted. The job had been blocking me from doing what I actually wanted to do, but I hadn't let myself think that clearly about it. Two years of weekly updates with no funding news has a way of making you careful with your own thoughts.

For nearly two years, every weekly update followed the same script. Leadership would share what they knew. There wasn't much to share. The company was burning through runway and the next round wasn't closed. We'd hear more soon. Same words, different week. You calibrate to it eventually. You stop expecting the news to change and start absorbing the weight of the uncertainty instead. It becomes background noise, except it isn't really noise, because noise doesn't exhaust you.

The uncertainty changes how you make decisions, but not in a way you can see from the inside. You think you're still committed. The belief is genuine. You show up, you do the work, you tell yourself you're fully in it. But the situation makes it impossible to actually see that through, and the gap between believing you're committed and being able to commit fully is something you only notice later, if you notice it at all. You stop telling people certain things because you're not sure what to say. You hold back in ways you can't name at the time. You do this for long enough and it stops feeling like anything. It just becomes how things are.

And it does something else too. You can feel it in the building. The walls start to creep in. The tension between people isn't loud, it's just there, sitting in every doorframe, between colleagues who are each quietly managing their own version of not knowing. The craft you showed up to do every day is still the craft. But the environment it lives in has changed shape around it. Without noticing, you start to separate the two.

So when the message came, I understood the relief immediately. What I didn't understand was what came after.

A few days later, I realised I had already fallen out of love with game development. Not with games, not with the people I'd worked alongside, but with the appetite for it. The thing I'd been building toward for years had quietly stopped being the destination, and I hadn't known until there was nothing left to distract me from seeing it.

It wasn't grief, exactly. It was something closer to recognising a loss that had already happened. The craft I'd oriented my career around, the reason I'd taken the job in the first place, had stopped meaning what it used to mean sometime during those two years. I hadn't decided anything. It had just gone, slowly, in the background, while I was busy managing the uncertainty.

That's the part nobody warns you about: uncertainty doesn't just wear you out, it changes what you want. You think you're waiting for the situation to resolve so you can get back to building the thing you care about. But the waiting does something to the thing you care about. By the time the ending came, I'd already been somewhere else for a while without knowing it.

The disorientation lasted longer than I expected. A solo founder without a domain is a strange thing to be. I knew how to build. I didn't know what to build toward. The relief was real but it left a lot of open air behind it.

The direction came eventually, faster than it might have. I started building again, found what I actually wanted to do, felt motivated by it in a way I hadn't in a long time. That part is true.

But the direction only came after the disorientation, and the disorientation only came after the loss, and the loss came after the ending. And the ending was never really the disruption.

The disruption was the two years before it. The slow erosion of weekly updates with nothing to report. The careful management of your own expectations until you stop expecting anything at all. The way you stop committing fully to a thing because the thing keeps not being fully there.

When the job ended, I could finally feel what the two years had done. Not in the moment of the Discord message, but in the days after, when the relief gave way to the loss, and the loss gave way to the question of what was actually left.

The job ending was just the moment the disruption became visible.

By then, it had already happened.