Mwanamke Jasiri
Mwanamke Jasiri
For the woman who is done waiting.
Why Smart Women Stay Too Long in Jobs They Hate
My sister, before you iron that uniform, pack that bag, or open that laptop for another week in a job that stopped making sense a long time ago, I need you to sit with one question.
When did you last feel genuinely excited to go to work?
Not relieved that you have a salary. Not grateful that you are employed when others are not. Not proud that your parents can tell the neighbours where you work. Genuinely, personally, deeply excited about the work itself.
If you cannot remember, that is your answer.
And yet you will go back on Monday. You have been going back for months, maybe years, telling yourself the same things you told yourself last month and the month before. This edition is about those things. About the reasons that feel completely solid and completely rational and keep you exactly where you are. About the price you are paying for each one. And about what it would mean to finally decide that price is too high.
This is not permission to quit your job tomorrow. This is an honest conversation about why you have not, and whether the reasons are as solid as they feel at 6am on a Monday.
The Chains That Feel Like Reasons
You are not staying in this job because you are weak. You are not staying because you lack ambition or intelligence or the capacity for something better. You are staying because you are a Kenyan woman, which means you are carrying a set of weights that nobody ever officially handed you but that landed on your shoulders so gradually you stopped noticing how heavy they are.
Let us name them. One by one.
The Degree Your Parents Sacrificed For
Your parents did not just pay school fees. They borrowed. They sold something. They went without. They sat with you at the table when you were studying and told everyone who would listen what their child was going to become. The pride in your mother’s face at your graduation was so complete, so total, that you have been quietly carrying it ever since like a debt you can never fully repay.
And so the degree must be used. The course must be practised. The professional identity your parents invested in must be maintained, because to walk away from it feels like walking away from everything they gave up to get you there.
This is one of the most powerful invisible forces keeping educated Kenyan women in careers that stopped fitting them years ago. Not the job itself. The weight of the sacrifice behind the qualification.
Your parents did not sacrifice so that you could spend your best years miserable in a career you have outgrown. They sacrificed so that you would have options. Staying when you should go is not honouring the sacrifice. It is wasting it.
The Fear of What They Will Say
Let us be honest about this one, because it is rarely spoken out loud.
You are not afraid of failing. You are afraid of failing in front of people who watched you succeed. You are afraid of the conversation at Christmas when your aunt asks how work is going and you have to explain that you left. You are afraid of your father’s silence when you tell him. You are afraid that the story your family has built around you, the educated one, the reliable one, the one who made it, will suddenly need to be rebuilt from scratch and you will have to stand there while everyone around you recalibrates their opinion of you.
In Kenya, where community identity is woven tightly into individual choices, this fear is not irrational. It is real and it is heavy. But here is what it is also doing: it is making other people’s comfort the ceiling of your life.
The people whose opinion you are protecting will have an opinion about everything you do regardless. They will have an opinion if you stay and are miserable. They will have an opinion if you leave and struggle. They will have an opinion if you leave and succeed. You cannot control the opinion. You can only control what you do with your one life.
The Responsibilities That Cannot Wait
Rent. School fees for younger siblings. Money home to Mama. The cousin’s university application you are helping to fund. The contribution to the family land project. The monthly figure that has to leave your account before you can breathe.
These are not excuses. They are real. They are the texture of life as a Kenyan woman who is the responsible one in her family, and they are heavy. They are also frequently used, sometimes by others and sometimes by yourself, to keep you from making any move at all.
But notice something. The responsibilities do not actually require this specific job. They require income of a certain amount. That income can, in theory, come from more than one source. The question is not “can I afford to leave this job” but “what would I need to build before leaving so that the responsibilities are still covered.” That is a planning question. It is much more solvable than it feels at midnight when the anxiety is loudest.
The Class and the Status
There is a particular kind of job in Kenya that carries weight beyond the salary. A government position. A corporate title. A role at a hospital, a bank, a respected institution. The business card that makes people nod when you hand it over at a networking event.
Leaving that comes with a social cost that is very specific to Kenyan professional culture. You are not just leaving a job. You are stepping off a recognised rung of a ladder that other people can see and understand. And what you might be stepping towards, a business, a creative career, a pivot into something newer and less understood, does not yet have a name that fits neatly on a business card.
This is real. The discomfort of occupying an undefined space in a society that values defined categories is genuinely uncomfortable. But it is also temporary. Every successful Kenyan businesswoman went through a period where she had no clean answer to “so what do you do?” The answer gets cleaner as the business grows. The discomfort is the cost of entry, not the permanent condition.
The Embarrassment of Starting From Zero Again
You have seniority. You have been in this field for five, seven, ten years. You know things. People come to you for answers. You have a position, a role, a place in the hierarchy that took a long time to build.
To start something new would mean being a beginner again. Making rookie mistakes in public. Not knowing things that others around you know easily. Being the person who asks the basic questions instead of the person who answers them.
For a smart woman who has built her identity around being competent, this is one of the most quietly terrifying prospects imaginable. It is also one of the most dishonest fears, because what you are actually afraid of is not incompetence. You are afraid of being seen to be learning. Which is different. And which is unavoidable in any life that is actually growing.
The Fear That You Will Try and Fail
This is the last one and it is the biggest one and it lives underneath all the others.
What if you leave, and it does not work? What if you start the business and it fails? What if you pivot and discover that what you imagined was possible is actually not? What if you give up the salary and the title and the certainty, and you end up with nothing, having proved everyone who ever doubted you completely right?
This fear is so large that many women never say it out loud. They talk about the degree and the parents and the responsibilities and the class. They rarely say: I am terrified that I am not as capable as I secretly believe I might be, and I would rather never find out than find out and be wrong.
The job, miserable as it is, at least proves nothing either way. You are capable enough to hold it. You are responsible enough to keep showing up. The cage is uncomfortable, but it is familiar, and familiar is the thing the frightened brain reaches for when the alternative is genuine uncertainty.
My sister, every woman who has ever built something lived in that uncertainty. Not briefly, not comfortably, but for long enough to find out that she was more capable than the fear told her she was. The fear does not go away before you start. It goes away slowly, as you go.
What Staying Is Actually Costing You
We talk about the reasons for staying as if they are free. They are not. Staying in a job that has stopped fitting you is not a neutral, risk-free choice. It has a price. It is just a price that is paid slowly, in ways that do not show up on a bank statement.
Every day you spend performing enthusiasm you do not feel, managing relationships you have outgrown, and doing work that no longer challenges you is a day of energy that did not go toward building something of your own. Energy is finite. Years spent in the wrong place are years that cannot be reclaimed.
A woman who has been shrinking to fit a role for years often cannot see how much she has shrunk. The confidence she had at 25, before the organisation taught her to stay in her lane, is not the confidence she carries at 35. Staying is not neutral. It is slowly teaching you that you are smaller than you are.
A salary that feels safe is still a ceiling. The woman who left five years ago and built her own income stream may now be earning two, three, four times what she would have earned staying put. There is a real KSh number attached to every year you remain in a role that has stopped growing you. That number is the opportunity cost of staying, and it compounds silently every year.
Chronic workplace misery is not a small thing. The Sunday dread. The Monday morning physical resistance. The headaches, the disrupted sleep, the low-grade anxiety that has become so familiar you have stopped recognising it as anxiety at all. Your body knows before your mind admits it. It has been trying to tell you for a long time.
Nobody will hand you a bill for these costs. They arrive quietly, over years, and they are very difficult to recover once you finally stop and count them. The question is not whether leaving has risks. The question is whether the risks of leaving are actually larger than the price you are already paying to stay.
How to Financially Prepare to Leave Before You Leave
Leaving a job without a plan is not jasiri. It is panic. The bold move is building the bridge before you cross it, so that when you go, you go with intention and with runway, not in desperation.
Start with your number. What is the minimum monthly income you need to cover your non-negotiable expenses: rent, food, transport, the family contribution you have committed to, utilities. Not your full current salary. The floor. The amount below which things genuinely fall apart. Write that number down.
Then build a six-month emergency fund equal to that number. This is your departure fund. It is not savings for a holiday or a laptop. It is the financial cushion that means leaving does not feel like falling. KSh 30,000 a month means a target of KSh 180,000. Start building it now, while you still have the salary, before you need it.
While you are building that fund, start the thing on the side. The business does not have to be profitable before you leave. It has to be started. It has to have its first customers, its first proof of concept, its first evidence that it can grow. Every month you run it alongside your job is a month of data, learning, and income that makes the eventual departure less frightening and more informed.
The goal is not to leave in a blaze of courage. The goal is to leave in a position of quiet, prepared strength. Build the fund. Start the side. And when the fund is full and the side is showing real signs of life, the decision becomes a calculation rather than a leap of faith.
Write the Number and Name the Date
This week, do two things. First, write down the minimum monthly income you need to survive without your current salary. Not comfortably. Just without things falling apart. That is your floor number.
Second, write down what you would build or do if your current job disappeared tomorrow and you had to generate income from scratch within ninety days. Not the perfect plan. The honest, immediate, I-would-figure-it-out plan.
Most women who do this exercise discover two things: their floor number is lower than they thought, and their backup plan is more formed than they realised. The job feels more necessary than it actually is, in part because you have never had to look at what life without it would actually require.
Look at it. The clarity alone is worth the ten minutes it takes.
You are more capable than the Sunday dread is telling you. You always were.
“I owe it to my parents to stay in this career.”
Your parents paid for your education because they loved you and they wanted you to have a better life than they had. The education was the gift. The specific career path was never part of the contract, even if it sometimes feels that way.
What your parents actually want, underneath the pride and the status and the ability to tell people what their child does for a living, is for you to be well. To be secure. To be happy. They want to see you thriving, not performing. And a daughter who is thriving in something they did not expect is still a daughter who is thriving.
The conversation about changing direction is frightening. Your parents may not understand immediately. They may worry. They may need time. But you are not a child anymore, and the most loving thing you can do for the people who sacrificed for you is to build a life that actually fits you, not a life that fits the version of you they imagined at your graduation.
Honouring your parents does not mean staying miserable in their name. It means using the opportunity they created for you to build something real, something sustainable, something that makes the sacrifice genuinely worth it.
The degree opened the door. What you do once you are inside is still your choice, my sister. It was always your choice.