Who Wants a New Job?
I finally don't
I left my corporate job 2.5 years ago, without clearly knowing what I’d do next. Since then, I’ve spoken with lots of people who’ve left their job or want to leave their job. A majority everyone I know doesn’t want their current job, but has trouble figuring out which jobs might be better. Which is why I’ve given a lot of thought to the topic of jobs.
So when I came across this outstanding article, I saved it and forwarded it to many of my friends. It has such a refreshing take on jobs, assuming that every job is a little bit crazy and the solution is to find the job that is crazy in the same ways you are.
The author goes on to explain the concept of “unpacking” a job, to investigate and imagine all the particular details of a possible job - to essentially simulate what your daily life would be like in that particular job. For example, if you want to be a wedding photographer, you should plan to spend every Saturday night as the only sober person in a hotel ballroom. If you want to be a surgeon, you’ll do the same procedure fifteen times a week for the next thirty-five years. Unpacking a job causes you to imagine that job differently - not the idealized version, but the nitty gritty daily version.
When I had a ‘very important’ corporate job, I wondered what a visiting alien would say I did. Mostly I spent my days moving from conference room to conference room, talking with different adults around tables, in between staring at my computer screen and sending emails or reading powerpoint files. Every other week I’d go to the airport and fly to a different city, where I’d drive to some tall office building and sit around a conference room table and talk to different people, then drive to a different building and sit in some similar conference room. I rarely went into a factory, I never touched hardware, and I never actually built anything that did anything in the world. My entire job consisted of talking to people or emailing people – that’s it - that’s all I did. I frequently wondered why I spent so much time doing things that seemed to matter so little. I had a hard time quantifying anything I did as being particularly meaningful in the bigger picture of the world.
When I was a high school teacher, I hung out with kids in a classroom all day talking about books and writing. My entire day was organized around the bell, which determined when I could go to the bathroom, when I could eat, and when I could leave. Every hour was rigidly structured and while I loved hanging out with feisty kids all day, I hated having the bell dictate everything about my life. I felt like a rat in a cage all day, constrained by walls and schedules and testing requirements. I longed to have more freedom and creativity without so much structure.
Now I’m a self employed writer. Let’s unpack this so-called job. I mostly hang out in my house and I write on a legal pad, or I write in a notebook, or I type on this computer. Sometimes I join zooms with other writers where we talk about our writing. I watch movies to analyze how they’re written. During each day I move between (a) the chair in my front window that faces the street (b) the cozy couch (c) my office desk, and (d) the kitchen table. I break up my day by walking outside to get sunlight on my eyeballs. I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner whenever I want. I wake up when I want, and I go to bed when I want. I don’t have any bells ringing or annoying people irritating me.
Most days, I write down words that I string together, and I analyze the words I’ve already written, and I read words that other people have written, and I think about how words work together to create emotions. I open the thesaurus to look for words similar to catastrophe. I think about specific words I love like exuberant, and murmuration and exhalant. I love how saying those words in my head feels in my body.
I have bookshelves in every room of my house and I’ve strategically positioned blank notebooks and pens all around the house. Sometimes when I wake up I lean over and write down ideas before I even get out of bed. When I read books I pay attention to point of view and the timeline and the narrarive arc. I focus on words that are unique or surprising. I notice the nuances of words more now.
I read words and I write words and I revise words and I give words to other people to read. And then we get together and talk about words. I listen to podcasts where other writers talk about their process of putting words together. This is indeed an obsessively crazy endeavor.
It’s even more crazy to think that I’ll spend years writing words and then I’ll have to work against the odds to sell my words and hope that other people will spend their valuable time to read them. It’s kind of absolutely insane to spend this much time writing a novel that might or might not make any money.
That unpacking article says that whatever you’re going to do for a lifetime of Tuesday afternoons, you better want to do it.
When I first decided to take a temporary sabbatical, I thought I was a woman with a book stuck in her head. Now I know I’m a writer with books stuck in every part of my body. I finished writing that first book and I’ve halfway written a second, and I’ve outlined four more. Along the way, I’ve figured out that my job is to help all these stories come alive in the world outside of me.
Elizabeth McCracken recently published a book about writing. She suggests: “To do anything, and enjoy it and improve, you have to have the stomach – the heart – for failure.”
Being willing to spend two years writing a novel feels like jumping off the cliff of security. It means leaving a stable path for the wild and unpredictable uncertainty of something entirely new. Something I’ll inevitably fail at first.
In order to embrace writing, I’ve had to embrace failure. I will fail as a writer because I’m still figuring out how to do this weirdly subjective thing. But sitting here at my desk today, I know I’d rather fail at writing than succeed at anything else.
Writing those words feels exhilarating, to finally feel my heart is aligned with my body. THIS is what I’m supposed to be doing, as unpredictable and irrational as it is. It’s half creativity and half analysis, half ideation and half revision. It forces me to use my left brain and right brain at the same time. This writing job is crazy in exactly the same ways I am crazy. This job and I are meant for each other.
I don’t care about chasing things like titles or salaries or status. I want to immerse myself in the things I love. I love sentences and stories and the emotions they evoke. I love imagining characters I made up in my head. I love saying: what if this happened… and then creating a whole new world of possibilites. I love helping characters and stories come to life.
This process of figuring out how to write a novel has changed me and now there’s no going back. That former self is gone. In her place is a woman who sits down every day and writes words onto the page. Words that take flight and weave themselves into stories that fly out into the world.
“I’d rather fail at writing than succeed at anything else.”
So brilliant, powerful.. and exuberant 👏👏
Being brave enough to step into your purpose isn’t failing at all.