Not long ago, I had a brush with (career) death. I almost blew my cover.

A colleague had read my column the prior week and noticed that I re-told the same story at someone’s leaving drinks. He put two and two together.

Luckily, he was a friend who wouldn’t try and “out” me. But I left the bar in a cold sweat, and realized I couldn’t keep writing this column forever. I was treading in extremely dangerous territory. If any employer found out I were the “City Girl,” he wouldn’t find it remotely funny or cool. He would be gigantically pissed off. And I’d be fired.

I suddenly had a very “Sliding Doors” moment. In one scenario, I quit the column, stayed in the City, and held onto the money and prestige for the next fifteen years. In the other, I came into work and told my employers to fuck off: I had better things to do with my life and my time.

Last week, I chose door number two.

I guess somewhere along the line, I stopped thinking about the size of my bonus and started focusing on the size of my impact.

Employing my affinity for numbers would allow me to spend wildly, but employing my flair for words would allow me to think creatively.

Next week, I’ll embark on the unknown, becoming a financial journalist and author. My book, “Confessions of a City Girl,” hits the shops August 13th. I’ll miss the City greatly, but deep down, I will always be a “City Girl” at heart: whisky drinking, cigar smoking, and above all, one of the guys.

I leave at a decisive moment for the City. Discovering what the crooks have been up to has been disillusioning, but not as disillusioning as coming to terms with the actions of so-called honest City bankers. After the greatest crash in living memory, we will ask ourselves for years to come what being wealthy truly means.

But will anything really, truly change? Or will some other City Girl be writing about this 30 or 60 years from now?

History suggests that as memory fades, financial players will find creative ways to learn the lessons the hard way. They will fall into that euphoric trap, convinced that “this time it’s different.”

Alas, by this time next week, I will be more than just a silhouette. There’s no turning back. It was Oscar Wilde who said, famously: “the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” As I leave the City to become a writer, it feels amazing to have done just that.