More and more people are giving their paycheck back to their employer in this new viral trend.

Yep! The company pays them, and they sign up to give it back to the organization in order to gain more favor.

I’m not actually meaning an ACH transfer, but they are paying their employer back in ways that don’t require Uncle Sam’s involvement.

I’m talking about the unseen currency.

The unseen currency is what the job asks you to pay every single day before you ever decide to leave. It starts taking before you ever realize you’re giving. It pickpockets, but after a while, you become an active, knowing participant in this theft.

The unseen currency is the energy it takes to walk into a building that no longer feels safe. Deduction. It’s rehearsing conversations before meetings so you don’t accidentally say something to upset you know who. Deduction. It’s sitting in your car during lunch because it’s the only place you can exhale. Deduction. It’s breaking your day into halves, then hours, then minutes because that’s the only way you can get through it. Major deduction.

It’s the mental math. How long will my savings last? Why haven’t I been saving? Could I wait tables? Could I drive for Uber? Could I make this work until I find something else? You know I’ve been wanting to become a stay at home. But I don’t have a spouse, so that’s not going to work. Delusion.

Then you start crowdsourcing permission to leave. You give almost anyone and everyone who will listen outside the organization a high overview of the troubles you’ve seen, and then ask if you’re making the right decision. You ask if leaving without another job is irresponsible given the extraordinary circumstances. You ask whether a gap on your résumé will ruin your career. You ask what future employers will think.

And it’s not because you don’t know what you need to do. It’s because you’re hoping someone else will absorb the weight of the decision.

Dear reader. They can’t.

They aren’t the ones paying the unseen currency.

They don’t spend eight hours in that environment. They don’t carry the anxiety home. They aren’t the ones in the depressive state. They don’t feel the slow erosion that happens in your heart for a job that you thought you’d love or have come to love.

The paycheck is easy to measure.

The unseen currency isn’t.

No one can see how many “good mornings” you had to force yourself to say. No one sees how much of yourself you spend pretending you’re okay. No one sees the version of you that stays quiet just to make it through another meeting.

And that’s why people often wait too long.

They’re calculating the dollars they’ll lose if they leave while completely ignoring the parts of themselves they’re losing by staying. They’re calculating the amount of shame they can handle if they choose themselves if no one ever gets to know their side of the story.

Some currencies can be earned back, like time or money, usually. But there are too many pieces of yourself that become much harder to recover once you’ve spent them.

You see, going into the red on a pretty little phone app connected to a piece of thin plastic is one thing, but remaining emotionally bankrupt can lead to months, if not years, of clawing your way back to normalcy. You keep paying even when you’ve physically left.

So if you ever needed someone to tell you to choose you… I’m telling you now. Choose. You.

This economy is the worst it’s ever been in my lifetime. Jobs are hard to find. Jobs are hard to get. Even the ones that used to have high turnover! It’s not that they’ve figured out how to fix their culture, the economy is literally holding a metaphorical gun to all of our heads because it’s either stay and get paid or leave and potentially starve. So because it’s a sellers market, buyers are holding still. Even if the house they’re in is dilapidated.

And if it’s ever to the point that you have to choose your life or the job? Choose your life. ALWAYS choose life. You don’t need everything figured out today. Things can be replaced, but we cannot replace you.

You know, as kids, we used to sing the song “This Little Light of Mine.” What they don’t tell you is that it’s a damn pilot light! The pilot should always be lit even when the rest of you isn’t.

But if it’s not lit, a little spark is all that’s needed to relight it. If your light has gone out, I hope this article will be the spark you need to get that light back on. Then, once you’ve dusted yourself off, dried the tears, and figured out how to get through today, just today, turn it up a notch and give off a glow that is bright as the fiery Phoenix.

Shine so that others see that failure is not the end. The story is still being written, and the unseen currency has made you even when it tried to break you.

Oh, and if you’re waiting to know when to leave a job? You know the day. You don’t need fourteen close friends and family members to “get it.” Your life is not run by the Supreme Court. It’s a dictatorship, not a democracy. You run this life. So go run it!