The emotional rollercoaster of quitting your job
I tend to do big things in odd years.
2005? Graduated from college.
2015? Got married.
2019? Had a kid.
2021? Left my job. In the middle of a pandemic. Without another one lined up.
On paper, it seems…unwise? irresponsible? stupid?
Am I crazy? lazy? overprivileged?
I’ve had all of these thoughts — and worse — in the weeks before and since the last day of my “day job.” It’s terrifying to realize that the “dream job” you’d been working toward for a long time isn’t. Especially when you have a child. Especially when you’re staring down your 38th birthday. Especially when you look around at your friends and peers who seem to have it all figured out, career-wise.
You can’t help but look in the mirror and ask, “What’s wrong with me?”
In reality, I’ve been having doubts about my career path for almost two years, since my maternity leave. I even wrote about them for Mother.ly last year. I started laying the foundation for a change in early 2020, hiring a career coach and having conversations with professional and personal friends to explore potential new paths. I was prepared to strike out on my own in the summer.
Then came COVID. I panicked, abandoning those plans in favor of my dependable, stable job. I even doubled-down on that choice by taking a new dependable, stable job. I believed that a new title, new responsibilities, and new surroundings would allay my previous frustrations about my career’s trajectory.
Narrator: It didn’t.
In fact, it magnified them. Faced with the additional stressors of family health issues, and the idea of moving to another state to start our lives over in a city where we’d have no immediate support system — I broke. And I walked away.
At first my decision felt exhilarating. When I announced my departure at the end of March, friends, family, and former coworkers reached out en masse. Some expressed support. Others congratulated me for putting my family first. Still more offered me connections to potential freelance writing and editing projects. Within the first week of my voluntary unemployment, I had calls with six possible new clients. I had friends refer me for three full-time jobs.
And then … crickets. Well, almost crickets. I got three emails from the companies to which I’d been referred, each politely informing me they wouldn’t consider me for the position. Needless to say, my exhilaration has evaporated.
Frankly, I’m scared. Although I have the security of some savings and a supportive husband with a steady income, I question my decision to leave at least once a day. I constantly wonder if I’m as good at my trade as my friends and family say I am, and whether I’m strong enough to overcome the rejection when potential clients and employers tell me I’m not. I tend to see not the potential of a blank canvas for an exciting future but a map with no roads.
Throughout this process of deciding to leave and choosing what to do next, I’ve leaned heavily on Glennon Doyle via my copy of Untamed, which I’ve underlined, flagged, and dog-eared to oblivion. She describes four keys of freeing yourself: Feel, Know, Imagine, and Let It Burn. She introduces them in linear fashion, but I’ve jumped around them a bit. I’m constantly feeling — anyone who talks to me for even five minutes knows I’m exceedingly sensitive and self-aware. I know that stepping away from my job was the right decision — for my family and for my mental health. And I’ve let it burn — I shed my identity as “director of advancement communications” and as someone with a full-time job (at least, for the moment). All that’s left to do is to imagine.
Unfortunately, I’m bad at imagining. I’m a rule-follower. A recipe-follower. A path-follower. I hated those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books when I was a kid. Give me guidelines to stay within and steps to take and I’m good to go. It’s what made me an exemplary student, up to and through graduate school. But it’s also made adulthood a more of a challenge for me than some others. What do you do when no one tells you what to do?
Helpfully, in Untamed, Glennon offers a kick-start: “What is the truest, most beautiful story about your life you can imagine?” But, she also warns, “the truest, most beautiful life never promises to be an easy one. We need to let go of the lie that it’s supposed to be.”
So that’s my mission for the next couple of days, maybe weeks. To determine what the “truest, most beautiful story” about my life would be. Then to draft it, strike through it, rearrange it, and most importantly, write it down. I have no idea what it’ll look like, or when I’ll be done. But when it is, I’ll let you know.
Let’s conjure up, from the depths of our souls: The truest, most beautiful lives we can imagine… Let’s put it all on paper. Let’s look at what we’ve written and decide that these are not pipe dreams, these are our marching orders. These are the blueprints for our lives, our families, and the world. May the invisible become visible. May our dreams become our plans. Glennon Doyle