In my blog post about returning to writing, some of you caught on to the bit where I mentioned being on the precipice of quitting my “big girl” job. I dislike that term for many reasons, not the least of which is the validity that it affords certain jobs while dismissing that of others. I am using it deliberately to highlight social conditioning amid my most recent career decision. My decision was to resign from my well-paying, cushy, remote position with a degree of seniority. I did so because I absolutely needed to. Since then, I have excitedly taken a significantly lesser-paying, rigorous in-person position with no seniority. My new work is in agriculture and horticulture which I have always been passionate about but never pursued until now. In no ambiguous terms, it has been regarded by many as a stupid and regressive decision.
As a very brief background, I could not support decisions that I, and others, agreed were unethical under my previous employer. This, alongside regularly being treated very poorly and the need to focus on my family, made for a perfect storm. Seven months of efforts to address concerns directly and examine my own perspective did not improve matters. It became evident that my time in that role had reached its expiration. I am going to limit my discussion of my former situation to this, as this is not a “trash the job” post, nor is that the posture I have overall. I want to focus on the things that I have learned and the exciting future ahead! A crucial contributor to my decision was Tess Vigeland’s book Leap Without a Net: Leaving a Job With No Plan B. I read it and then read it again.
It was comforting to have someone with higher stakes than me discuss a very similar experience. It was also informative about the various challenging elements involved in the type of decision I was considering at the time and am now fully submerged in. It was a realistic conversation about common (and uncommon) social, fiscal, and psychological consequences of stepping away from a “serious” job into a “less serious” job. Some chapters were straightforward. I had certainly not imagined that I was the only person who’d ever experienced sleep disruption, hair loss, and bouts of depression due to a bad work situation. However, other chapters dissected the complex nature of workforce culture and social pressures that were a necessary topic for me to ingest. These were the chapters that helped clarify my own fears and also my passions.
I had also not examined many of the elements that Vigeland describes in her book that now seem obvious—namely, the absurdity of social conditioning surrounding the American workforce and how it can and does trap so many people in unhappy situations. I had not examined just how rooted in my mindset this conditioning is, and how powerful it was in pushing me toward staying unhealthy and unhappy. I had grown comfortably uncomfortable in a sustained period of stagnancy.
I take responsibility for this. I think it is natural to sink into familiarity, especially if circumstances in other arenas of life vary. It was a specific and costly choice for me to keep the familiar (my job) in order to have one thing remain stable while everything else in my life fluctuated. And for some, this is not something they get to have a choice in. I am very aware that my ability to have made one choice up until now, and then make a different and risky choice, is in and of itself a privilege. I do not take it for granted. Stagnancy is a particularly sneaky foe and educator.
Now that I am sleeping deeply and excited to go to work every day—despite getting paid significantly less and having less free time—I look back in awe at my willingness to stay in a physically and psychologically unhealthy state for so long. The theoretical knowledge of stepping away from things you aren’t passionate about and/or aren’t healthy in is much easier to examine when it is not being executed in your life. This is nothing new. My blogging about this is not at all original. It seems to be a common understanding among working adults, yet it also seems to have very few actual followers—the people who are both able and willing to risk a lot… sometimes everything… to do work that is a better fit for their overall well-being.
I can’t do this vast topic justice in one post. It has very different schools of thought and generational discrepancies that range from “a job is just a job—buck up and do what needs to be done” to “life is too short to waste five days of your week for most of your life miserable.” I have practiced the previous posture for extended periods of time in my past and can now say that I assign myself more firmly with the latter. I see elements of value in both attitudes. But now that I have more recently jumped headfirst out of a very secure job dripping with social affirmation into a risky job without nearly as much social affirmation, I can confidently state for myself that life is too short to be barely tolerating a work situation for most of the day and most of the week… for most of my life.
Again, this seems obvious, but the theoretical is not as difficult to navigate as the actual fear when I finally sent my resignation letter. The theoretical does not initially present the reality that doing something you love will still have days of doubt and defeat. The theoretical doesn’t give a roadmap for how to handle skepticism and dismissal based on your job title alone—especially because it’s the most common question at a cocktail hour and often paired with appraisal of skills and values: “So what do you do for work?”
The theoretical did prepare me for the reality of severe fiscal rearrangement, sacrifices of lots of previous lifestyle choices, taking on new increased risk of physical injury in my daily work, big changes to free time availability, and of course huge conversations with my husband about how it impacts our lives mutually. My decision is not revolutionary, and necessary sacrifices to make it happen don’t make for a “poor me” cloud. It is simply not easy, but incredibly rewarding. I don’t intend to spend more of my life working in misery and reserving truly living for weekends or small intervals in between work hours.
I used to be mentally and emotionally drained at the end of each workday. I considered that my normal and was still grateful to have a job, and knew that everything involved in it was still a choice and I was living with my choices. It wasn’t all bad, but I was not really living.
Now, by the evening of each day I am absolutely physically exhausted, but my heart and mind are content. I am not losing sleep or hair anymore! I am embodied, and able to be a better wife, friend, and daughter because I have emotional and mental bandwidth to offer. My hands and body are beat up and require a lot of extra care, but my soul isn’t stagnant. I don’t have money to spend like I used to, and sometimes that sucks, but most of the time I am reminded of the lack of necessity in most of what I would spend on anyway. I am not too proud to acknowledge the areas in which privilege and money were the soil I had been growing lazy or wasteful in. What a gift it is that this time in my life has re-grounded me in many ways.
Several months prior to this decision to change jobs, when I’d been sitting at my kitchen table crying after another severely condescending work scenario, I wrote a poem/prayer (?). I was feeling angry at myself for not taking up the mantle of my own self-respect. I was feeling small and exhausted and trapped. I also knew that the only person who was going to change that was me. I dramatically and angrily wrote it to the universe with the internal volume of a thousand hurricanes and zero external expression besides crying at the table.
I read it this week after a long, tiring, happy work week and thought to myself… I think I was writing it to myself, imploring myself to get the hell up, grow up a little more, move on, and take care of myself. And that I did—with the support of friends and family… and finally with my own support of myself. I needed to remember once again that my use of time within the small scope of a single life that can’t be re-done is absolutely worth the risk. It’s surprisingly easy to lose track of that throughout a life, but the hope is that we keep coming back to it.
I know not everyone can or will make a decision like the one I’ve made, or perhaps they will but in different arenas of life. My wish for anyone reading is simply that a job is never draining more of your life than its ability to contribute to it.
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