My Corporate Recovery Stack
The small, practical things helping me unlearn urgency and rebuild a life that actually supports me.
First things first, let’s pop some champagne! On Your Terms crossed the 1000 subscribers mark last week, and in honor of that, I would love to get to know you better so I can support you optimally in your journey. Please take 3 mins to respond to these few questions. I’ll share what I learn from these responses in a future newsletter so you can see what’s resonating across this community.
The body remembers
It was October 4th, 2024, and I had just shut my work laptop down for what would turn out to be the last time. I was going on early maternity leave, and the moment the screen went dark, I felt a weight come off my shoulders. I could finally just be happy about my pregnancy, and I could look forward to my baby without having to perform for my employer.
Five months later, I got the notification that I would be laid off, and another weight was lifted. The reason it lifted is the part I want to sit with, because for those five months on maternity leave, I had still been thinking about my job almost every day. I was anxious about what I’d come back to, the drama I’d left behind and how it would have unfolded without me, and whether I’d survive another round of it mentally. Five months away, and I still hadn’t unplugged.
The layoff was what finally cut the cord, and I thought that would be the end of it.
It wasn’t. Even now, months later, I’ll be sitting in a quiet house at 8:15 in the morning and notice that my chest is tight for no reason at all. Even without the corporate pressures, my body still braces for some version of me that should already be three tasks deep into the day.
This is the part nobody tells you about leaving corporate. The calendar clears before the nervous system does, and you can build a new life while your body is still running on the old one.
So I’ve stopped pretending that what I’m doing is just designing a routine, because what I’m actually doing is recovery. The things in my stack are not productivity hacks; they are the small props holding me up while I unlearn an entire way of being.
Here we go.
My actual stack
Daycare
We found a home daycare with only 5 kids, and the owners have now been dubbed his extra set of grandparents because that’s the kind of love they show him, since his real grandparents don’t live close by.
My son started there when he was 4 months old, and I was drowning in postpartum depression, anxiety, rage, everything, you name it. Daycare saved me. It made me get out of my house, wear proper clothes, interact with other people, and gave me space to sleep and start the process of recovery. He went for 3 days a week back then, and I’m so thankful for them. They thought they were caring for my son, but they were saving his mom.
Now he goes 5 days a week and has the time of his life playing with his daycare friends and getting loved on by his daycare grandparents. I am the kind of mom who needs time away from her child to be a good mom, and I say that now without apology, though it took me a while to get there. What daycare is really doing is giving me back hours that don’t belong to anyone else, and learning what to do with hours that no one is claiming has been harder than I expected. The first reflex is to fill them, but the work is letting some of them stay empty.
Slow mornings
If he was up at 5 am and I'm running on fumes, I come home from drop-off and nap, without guilt and without earning it first. That sentence still feels strange to type. If I'm not tired, I move slowly, read my devotional, and let the house be what it is for a while before I open my laptop. A slow morning used to be something I stole on vacation, and now it's the load-bearing wall of my week. Everything else only works because the morning is allowed to breathe.
The fitness trainer in India
Three days a week, I train with a coach based in India (y’all need to see my muscles!). He runs my sessions from his home to mine, on my schedule, in my house, at a price I can actually afford on a self-employed income. I’ve tried Orange Theory, I’ve tried Pure Barre and Bar method, I’ve tried other boutique studio that were supposed to help, and this is the thing that’s working for me right now (and he asked me to share his details!!)
If you want to find him, his name is Sachin, and he’s a certified trainer with 8+ years of experience offering 1-on-1 online coaching. You can reach him on WhatsApp at +91 93184 64650. Tell him Tomide sent you his way.
A calendar shaped around how my brain actually works
I learned something about myself that no corporate environment ever gave me the room to notice: I am not good at taking calls and doing real work on the same day. If I stack three calls in a morning, the afternoon is gone because i’m too exhausted to function. I used to think that meant something was wrong with me, but it doesn’t. It means calls and thinking are different jobs, and my brain wants them on different days.
So Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays are bookable, with Tuesdays and Thursdays as my heavy call days, and I let them be heavy. Wednesdays are for deep work and no one can put anything on my calendar. Fridays are not a workday, though that one is still a work in progress because the work I’m doing is woven into my life now in a way it never was at Meta or Twitter. The calendar isn’t about working less; it’s about not lying to myself about how I actually function.
Therapy, every two weeks
She helps me look backwards, at the patterns and the parts of me shaped by environments I’ve now left. A lot of what I called ambition was something else underneath, and therapy is where I sit with that without rushing to a conclusion. I should mention that I also still work through my birth trauma in therapy. Both are a work in progress.
Coaching, every week
She helps me look forward. She gives me frameworks for decisions I’m too close to see clearly, and she asks the questions that reorganize how I’m thinking about a problem. Where therapy helps me understand how I got here, coaching helps me figure out where I’m going without defaulting to the only playbook I ever knew.
Both of them are non-negotiable for me right now.
How’s it really going?
I’m still in it. Most weeks the stack holds, and some weeks the urgency leaks back in, and I find myself answering a message at 9 pm that could have waited until morning, or feeling guilty for a slow Tuesday, or treating a slow Friday like a problem to solve.
I’m further along than I was a year ago, and the small, seemingly unglamorous things are what got me here.
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💭Your turn
What's in your corporate recovery stack?
Hit reply. I’d love to hear.
P.S.
On Your Terms crossed 1,000 subscribers last week, and in honor of that, I would love to get to know you better so I can support you optimally on your journey. Please take 3 mins to answer these questions.
congrats on 1k! I’ve recently took the leap of switching to self-employed, and it was so odd not to feel my chest tighten or heart dropping from a message notification. I am slowly building my own routine and allowing myself to go after what fills my cup. Thank you for sharing your personal story.
This sentence 👏🏻👏🏻"I come home from drop-off and nap, without guilt and without earning it first."
Really trying to lean into slow, soft mornings and evenings. I know I need to do what is good for my soul to wake up and wind down.