For two years, Priya had been the person everyone called. The one who stayed late. The one who answered emails at midnight and came in on Sundays and said yes to every request before the question was finished. She told herself it was temporary. She told herself she enjoyed it. Then one morning she sat at her desk and could not remember why any of it mattered. She stared at her screen for forty minutes without typing a word. Her hands were steady, but something behind her eyes had simply stopped. She had not noticed herself burning out. That was the thing about it — you rarely did.

Priya's therapist gave her one instruction: stop working at seven. Not eight. Not after one more email. Seven. It felt almost impossible at first — the guilt, the habit, the fear that everything would fall apart without her. But she started turning off notifications. She started cooking again. She began taking the long route home. Slowly, the evenings stopped feeling like wasted time and started feeling like hers. The work didn't collapse. Nobody seemed to notice she'd left at seven. What she noticed was that she arrived in the morning with something she hadn't had in years: the quiet willingness to begin. Learning to wind down had not made her less capable. It had made her possible again.