Failing the Parking Lot Test
Dread is data. You just keep ignoring it.
I remember sitting in my car before work. Engine running. Eyes on the building.
I was not late. I was not sick.
I just could not make myself walk in.
That pause lasted maybe three minutes. But something happened in those three minutes that I spent the next several years trying to explain away. Something inside had already quit, even though my body still showed up every day.
I called it burnout. I called it a rough stretch. I called it Tuesday.
What it actually was: a verdict. My body had reached one before my mind was willing to admit it. And I overruled it. Put the car in park, grabbed my bag, and walked through the doors.
I walked in anyway.
The Body Reports
Here is what I know about the body after 30 years inside someone else’s business. It does not editorialize. It does not catastrophize. It does not care about your mortgage or your title or what your LinkedIn profile says about you. It just reports.
And when the report says something is wrong here, it is usually right about six months before your brain catches up.
The Parking Lot Test is not complicated. It is this: if you sit in your car before work and feel dread, your body is telling you something. Not that the job is hard. Not that the week is long.
Dread is specific.
Dread means the cost of this place has exceeded what you are willing to pay, and some part of you already knows it.
Most of us fail the test and keep going anyway.
I failed it for years.
The Rationalization Cage
The rationalizations are sophisticated. That is what makes them dangerous.
“I have responsibilities. People are counting on me. The market is bad. This is just a phase. Everyone feels this way sometimes. I have worked too hard to walk away from this. I will figure out the exit later.”
Every one of those sentences is reasonable on its own. Stack them together over a long enough period and they become a cage built entirely from sensible-sounding materials.
I know this because I built that cage. Brick by brick. One rational justification at a time.
I spent a decade in a side hustle selling insurance while holding down my day job. I told myself it was a backup plan. A diversification strategy. Responsible.
What it actually was: an escape hatch I kept propped open but never walked through.
The insurance chapter taught me something I did not want to know. I was not building an exit. I was building evidence that I could, so I did not have to.
The exit was never the problem.
The decision was.
The Parking Lot Tax
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from overriding your own signals long enough. It is not the tired you feel after hard work. Hard work tired is clean. You earned it. You sleep and you come back.
This is different.
This is the tired that follows you home. That sits across from you at dinner. That wakes up with you on Sunday morning before the week has even started.
I am not talking about clinical burnout, though that is real and it matters. I am talking about the quieter version. The one that looks like competence from the outside. You are still performing. Still delivering. Still getting the job done. Nobody in the building would guess anything was wrong.
That performance has a price.
And the price compounds.
What you spend to override the signal every morning comes out of something. Focus. Creativity. Patience with the people you love. The bandwidth to build anything outside the walls of the place that is draining you.
You are not just tired at work.
You are tired everywhere.
That is the Parking Lot Tax.
And most people pay it for years without ever naming it.
Clarity Is Enforcement
I started CTRL-ALT-REINVENT because I needed a framework to keep myself moving when the excuses got loud.
CTRL stands for Clarity. Tenacity. Reinvention. Legacy.
Four pillars. One purpose: to help stuck Gen X professionals figure out what comes next without detonating the life they built.
But Clarity is the foundation. Everything else depends on it.
And Clarity, in my experience, does not arrive on its own. You do not stumble into it. You do not wait for it.
You enforce it.
You sit with what your body already knows and you stop arguing with the verdict.
The Parking Lot Test is a clarity mechanism. Your nervous system has been running the numbers. It knows the math.
The pause before you walk in is not weakness or ingratitude or lack of professionalism.
It is information.
The question is whether you are willing to receive it.
Using the Signal
I still have my day job. I am not writing this from the other side.
The exit is the plan, not the premise, and the plan is still in motion.
Burned out from the job. Fired up from the build.
Both things are true right now, at the same time, on the same Wednesday morning.
But I am not overriding the signal anymore.
I am using it.
Every morning that the parking lot feeling shows up, it reminds me why I am building. It clarifies the cost of staying and the cost of not moving fast enough.
Yesterday it showed up again. Same building. Same engine running. Different response.
It is not the enemy.
It is the data.
The mistake I made for years was not failing the Parking Lot Test.
The mistake was grading it on a curve.
The Only Honest Voice in the Room
You already know if you have been here. The specific version of it is different for everyone. Maybe it is the parking lot. Maybe it is the Sunday dread. The moment before you open your laptop. The meeting you sit through on mute while something inside you goes very quiet.
Whatever the form, the test is the same.
Your body is reporting.
The question is not whether you can push through it.
The question is:
How long are you going to keep overruling the only honest voice in the room?
—
Thanks for reading.
~ JP
If this piece named the signal, the next one is about what to do with it.
CTRL Signals by JP Bristol
Clarity. Tenacity. Reinvention. Legacy
My takeaway from this great piece is to pay attention to the signals. Your mind and body are providing information. And, even if change is not reasonable in that moment, pay attention. Designing your exit plan, whether today or next year, provides relief and evidence you are paying attention.