I Bled Magenta

I had the t-shirts. The jackets, the hats, a fleece I think I wore exactly twice. Some things I still wear years later. T-Mobile gear accumulates the way company gear does, and most of it sat in a drawer. But I want to be honest about something: I was the guy who bled Magenta. Not the gear, exactly. The deeper thing the gear stood in for. For most of my adult life, if you’d asked me who I was, the answer would have started with where I worked.

I didn’t notice that for a long time, because it felt like commitment. And commitment is supposed to be the good thing. Show up, care, give the work your whole self. I felt important and needed because there was always an email or meeting that needed my attention, even when I was on vacation. Friends would tease me for my Pavlovian response to a text alert or an email message while sitting down with them for dinner. I was T-Mobile. Nobody warns you, though, that “your whole self” can quietly become “only that self,” and that you won’t feel the swap happening because it feels exactly like dedication right up until the moment it doesn’t.

For me, the moment came as a misunderstanding. The specifics don’t matter much, and they’re not really the point. What matters is that I hit a fork: fight or flee. When I stopped to seriously consider my options, it required a bit of self-reflection, and I did not like what I saw. My entire professional identity, and a good chunk of my personal one, was wrapped around a company. My values were braided through theirs so tightly I couldn’t have told you where one ended and the other began. I had nowhere to plant my feet because the only ground I’d ever stood on was borrowed.

So I left. Voluntarily. Nobody eliminated my role. There was no restructure, no layoff, no ground shifting underneath me. I removed myself, which was, frankly, terrifying, because I’d had a moment of clarity that I needed to go find out who I was apart from the logo. That’s not the usual version of this story. The usual version is the one where the company moves and catches you flat-footed. Mine was the one where the company stayed exactly where it was and I still had to walk away, because the fusion itself was the problem.

Here’s the part I only understood much later, after a diagnosis and insight I didn’t have at the time.

I have ADHD. It is something I’ve always had. It is a core part of who I am and it informs everything in my life. It is simply how my brain is physically wired. Not recognizing it, though, made it extremely easy for me to latch on to a ready-made external identity. Looking back at that time and that role, I was almost certainly bored. I was even attempting to post to new roles in different domains to scratch that learning itch and get that sweet dopamine hit of mastering something new. The role I was in had stopped feeding the part of my brain that needs to be fed, and an under-stimulated ADHD brain gets loud and demanding. It turns up the volume on every discomfort until you can’t tune it out anymore.

For a while I told myself that was the story. I left because I was restless. Easy, tidy… a little dismissive. But it’s wrong, and the distinction matters more than it looks.

The boredom was the catalyst. It was not the reason.

A catalyst doesn’t create the reaction. It just lowers the energy it takes for something that was already true to finally happen. The over-fusion, the part where I’d disappeared into an employer- that was true the whole time. It was sitting there for years. The boredom didn’t invent it. The boredom just made it impossible to keep ignoring. Without the ADHD restlessness turning up the volume, I might have coasted comfortably for another decade, fully merged, never asking the question.

But the question itself, who am I without this?, was the right question. And I answered it correctly by leaving.

I’m careful about this now because there’s a cheap version of hindsight that explains everything and therefore explains nothing. “Oh, that was just the undiagnosed ADHD.” No. The ADHD tells me why then, why so suddenly. It does not get to overwrite what I realized. Both things are true at once: I was under-stimulated, and I had genuinely fused my identity to a company in a way that wasn’t healthy for me. The first one is why the alarm finally went off. The second one is why the alarm was worth listening to.

And I’ll say the harder thing, the one that surprised me. T-Mobile wasn’t a bad employer.

It was a good one, with values I actually shared. I even seriously considered trying to get back to them a couple of times through the years. That’s what makes this worth writing down. We talk about losing yourself in a job like it only happens at toxic companies, like the danger is the employer who doesn’t deserve your loyalty. But I lost myself inside a place I genuinely liked. The risk isn’t only bad employers. The risk is total fusion, and total fusion can happen even when everything around you is fine. Especially when everything is fine, because nothing forces you to check.

So now I keep a little distance, on purpose. Not cynicism. Not holding back. Just a boundary that says: this is the work, and over here is me, and the second one doesn’t get handed over no matter how good the first one feels. I can be all-in on what I’m building and still know exactly where I end and where the logo begins.

I built that boundary because the ground will keep moving. And because, as I learned, sometimes the ground stays perfectly still and you’re the one who has to move.

The shirt goes on when it serves the work. The rest of the time, I’m just me.

It only took me most of a career and some mental health counseling to figure out the difference.