I Wanted to Be There When It Worked

Just Julia · Sep 22, 2026 · 6m · transcript

There are endings that hurt because something failed.

And then there are endings that hurt because something finally worked, just after you were no longer there to see it.

I think I am grieving the second kind.

A chapter of my professional life ended recently. It was unexpected, and for a while, I thought losing it would be the hardest part.

It wasn’t.

The hardest part came afterwards.

Things I had spent months working towards started happening. Things I had fought for, waited for, worried about, believed in when they still felt impossibly far away.

They were finally becoming real.

And I…