I never thought I would spend this much time formatting a resignation document

Staring at the empty resignation form for three hours

I sat at my desk, staring at a cursor that refused to move. It’s funny how a piece of paper, or a digital template if we’re being precise, can feel so heavy. I had downloaded a standard ‘Recommendation for Resignation’ form—the kind you find on those generic legal document sites—but looking at it, I suddenly felt like I needed to draft a funeral oration. I remembered reading about these old, formal ‘Jemun’ (a memorial address) rituals, where people would write elaborate laments for broken needles or departing friends. I felt like that, but instead of mourning a needle, I was mourning my professional pride, or maybe just my patience. The document template asked for ‘reasons for leaving’ in such a clinical, boxes-to-tick way that it felt insulting to the last three years of my life. I ended up deleting everything I wrote three times because it either sounded like a legal threat or a desperate plea.

The strange obsession with perfect formatting

I started searching for other templates—portfolios, letters of attorney, company seal registration forms—just to see if I could find a ‘style’ that matched the gravity of the moment. It’s a weird habit of mine, over-researching the form instead of the content. I found myself looking at these rigid structures, thinking about how my previous manager would probably just skim through it, not caring whether I used the right header size or the approved Korean office standard font. I spent maybe 40,000 won for a month-long subscription to a document platform, which now feels like a complete waste of money given that I only really needed one page. It’s a common trap, I suppose. I wanted the document to look professional, as if the right layout could shield me from the awkwardness of the actual HR meeting.

When the reality of the office hits you

There’s a specific kind of friction when you try to print these things out at work. The office printer, an old, loud machine that always seems to jam when you’re in a hurry, had a wait time of nearly fifteen minutes because someone else was printing a massive report. Standing there, listening to the mechanical grinding, I thought about the theater actor Yoon Je-moon, and how stories go that he once fell on stage so realistically people thought it was an accident. I felt like that in my own way—putting on a performance of ‘I am leaving for personal development’ while my pulse was racing. I wasn’t falling down on stage, but I was definitely fumbling the lines. The reality is, none of the fancy templates I downloaded actually made the conversation easier.

Dealing with the leftovers of a paper-heavy culture

I still have the unused template files sitting in a folder on my desktop, named ‘final_final_resignation_v2’. I don’t know why I keep them. Maybe it’s just the habit of someone who grew up seeing their parents collect every receipt, every document, every scrap of paper as if it were a historical record. I look at those forms and feel a strange mix of relief and annoyance. The annoyance comes from the fact that I spent so much time worrying about whether I used the right ‘representative seal’ form or if the spacing was correct for a formal letter of submission, when really, nobody in that office was ever going to look at that document once I walked out the door. It was just a box to be checked, a formality to clear the path for the next person in line. I still think I could have just written it on a blank piece of paper and it would have had the same effect, but that didn’t stop me from agonizing over it for an entire Tuesday morning.