so, you're thinking about quitting your job.

i've only ever quit a job once in my entire life. i've worked at so many places and done so many things, but i've never really actively sat down with my employer and had a serious conversation saying,  "i'm leaving. here is my two weeks notice." this is partly due to my fear of confrontation. this is also partly. due to my fear of disappointing authority figures. however, this is mostly because i never really had a job where people depended on me specifically. they needed someone to just be there. so when i left for college and the place i had been at for years never heard back from me, or when i graduated and could not longer be the "student receptionist", they simply got someone else to fill my shoes. the one exception to that is this time i actually did quit my job as a server at a local pizza restaurant. i don't even think i stayed the two weeks because i'd initially requested the next two weeks off before i quit, so essentially, i just kind of up and left that joint and didn't look back.

 

now, obviously, that place was not the kind of place that i wanted to work my way up the ladder to become apart of. i didn't want to be manager or a shift lead or anything like that. frankly, the place had the vibes of a restaurant that you would see on kitchen nightmares. we fully microwaved our chicken. the water in the pasta cooker only got changed once a day. we never wore gloves. people stole alcohol from the deep freezer and got drunk during work. the ceiling leaked frequently. it was a literal kitchen nightmare and the pizza was the only thing there worth eating. however, i promise you that if gordon ramsey came to the place, he would probably burn it to the ground and although, i was walking away from a terrible working environment, which made me feel better about myself, that small change felt like i was blowing up my entire life. i didn't know what i wanted to do once i left. i was leaving this realm of comfortability and essentially, throwing myself off a cliff, which, is something that did not make me feel better about myself. 

 

this is similar to how i feel right now as i think about how i feel about potentially leaving my current position, one that i actually do enjoy and one i actually saw myself climbing the corporate ladder at. i don't know when or how i started to notice the existential sentiments i had about working. i don't know when or how i started to think about if what i was doing was "enough" for me or if i was actually satisfied with the work i was putting out. maybe it was the amount of time i spent in the bathroom on tik tok away from my desk. maybe it was the amount of time i spent trying to find a project to fill the void and finding myself constantly coming up short. maybe it was the fact that i noticed that no one around me seemed to be thinking the same things that i was. that there was no more spark. that there was no more passion. and moreover, everyone around me was fine with working that way. to them, work seemed like something they had to to do until they died and that was it. the idea of work was just one of the many things on this long to-do list and they were okay with that, but i was not. i needed more, but, again, i didn't quite know what that looked like, so, i thrust myself off the cliff once more.

each time i start a new job, i simply think to myself, "this is it." for years, i built my life around work and constantly playing around with the idea of moving up and making something for myself even if it wasn't what i wanted to do because i thought i had to. i pictured myself with this dream job where i was at the top of the company, some "junior" this, or "senior" that, where i made a lot of money and told people what to do.  although, now i know that there is no such thing as the "dream job" and that dreaming of labor is frankly, a silly concept fed to us by our parents and romantic comedy protagonists, i think that for the longest time i conflated this idea of financial stability with emotional stability. i thought, if i made a lot of money and could do cool things with that money, i would be set, but this is an unfortunate fallacy that people tell themselves. we live in a society where working is a necessary part of life because we depend on it to survive. most people are not working to find a purpose or to fill their time. people are not living to work. they are working to live. i am no exception to this. in between working all of these jobs, i've found myself always seeking a higher purpose through my work, but this process was constantly upended by things around me that seemed to be more important than finding a purpose, like my ugly, dirty apartment, or my student loans, or a random check engine light going off in my car. every time i thought about getting out to do something better, i felt something drawing me back in, chiding my worries away with this idea that if i could pay my bills, i was fine.

but what happens when its not enough to simply be "fine"? what happens when your bills are all paid and you have a job you somewhat enjoy, but you still are frustrated by everything else around you - you, the town you live in and even your apartment, when you think too hard about it. again, i used to think that if i was ambitious and kept working, i would be happy and everything else would fall in place, but one day, i woke up and noticed that i was putting in the work and that still wasn't happening. so, then what?

well then, decided to to move 5 hours away. i made a change and i picked up everything and left. or at least, i tried to because i'm still here, even though i have an apartment in a town far away. i'm still working here. i'm still living here. i'm still here, caught between two places like a ghost. and while i went and made a big decision to leave and it did make me happy to some extent - i felt held down the weight of a job that i enjoyed and put a lot of effort into at the time. it was the only thing keeping me here, so, as i sat at the brink of blowing up my entire life once again, i thought to myself for the first time in a long time: is it time for me to quit? and if so, how was i going to do it? i had to do it, but how was i going to actually do it?

now, besides my fear of authority and confrontation and this aspect of blowing up my life without a plan, i physically hated the feeling of quitting because it felt a lot like i was giving up on something. like i said before, i had built much of my life and my identity around work. my resume and my skills feel like a reflection of me - much like when you go into a interview and you're asked about "who you are", you tell them about what skills you have. those skills made up the kind of person they wanted, thus making you valuable -  all of the things a 23 year old with abandonment issues, like myself, wanted to hear. i thought that being needed by a company meant that i was worth something and that without them, i didn't quite know who i was. i'd worked time-and-time again as a body for companies that barely knew who i was outside of my skillset and i really thought they valued me. this was a lie. i thought that, somehow, if i had found my dream job and this perfect place that needed me in all the right ways and i could fulfill those needs, that i had found my purpose. and for the longest time, that was my purpose: being needed.

but, as i sit here and think about what i am going to do with the rest of my life, these are things i know to be true. 1. i love my job. 2. feeling dissastification does not say as much about me as it does the things around me. 3. i am working to become the kind of person that i want to be - that other people want to be around and employ - not the kind of person that other people need me to be. 4. you are allowed the change your mind, make big or small changes or whatever you need to do to become that person. 5. i haven't quit my job yet and i don't know how or when i will.

 

and that's perfectly okay. i know at some point i'm going to have to throw myself off the cliff and into the unknown once more, but this time someone is going be there to catch me. or somehow, i might be able to find balance and land on my own two feet all by myself.