I quit my job (current position of 3 years, in an organization I’d been with for 24. Yes, 24 years.) There’s a lot behind that statement that is not the subject of this post. Instead, I want to just put a marker down that in a few weeks I will be in a brand new-to-me state of being. Without a day job to be thinking about and mentally preparing to ‘do’ for the first time since I was 15 years old. I count my education years as ‘work’ – for itself and also because I always had some sort of work-study or assistantship when I was studying. So I’ve been working for 37 years, with a very small few weeks off for maternity leave 16 years ago.
That’s a long time. In ye olden dayes, I hear tell that people could retire after 37 years! I’m not retiring, I’m just taking a little bit of downtime before deciding on next steps. A friend of mine close to my age said recently (paraphrase) “I feel like I’ve got a good 5-10 years of really experienced creativity and idea generation to offer when I’ll also have some decent energy, too, so I want to be in a place where I can do what will probably be my best work.”
Me too. I don’t know what that’s going to look like. Another friend of mine, a therapist (but not my therapist) cautioned me to not make assumptions about how I would feel once I have officially left – my soul and brain have never been in that state-of-being before, and they reminded me to just wait and see how I feel and how my mental health is after I’ve had a little time removed from the day-to-day internal and external pressures of management and working life.
I fully recognize the immense privilege I have that allows me to do this, at least for a little while. And believe me, the Calvinist/Puritan-work-ethic guilt is strong in me. And I get that ‘middle-class, middle-aged white woman hangs out at home for a few weeks’ is ‘news’ that’s not even worth the electrons spent displaying this text to you. But, hey, my blog, my words. It’s a big deal to me, even if unremarkable in the grand scheme of things. And I am super grateful to my immediate family who are being supportive (emotionally and otherwise) of me doing this risky and frankly, terrifying (again, to me), thing. It’s time for a big change in this little one and precious life. Let’s go.
A relevant poem from Held:
