Change is hard.
I left my government job over three years ago and I still sputter out excuses when I cross paths with someone who questions the narrative. No one can understand why. No one can make sense of decoupling from a career out of free will.
An interaction usually goes something like this:
Oh, hey—how are you? What are you up to these days—still with… We worked together or we knew each other professionally and the only thing we had in common was our ties to that job.
No. I’ve been gone for years now. You?
No. I’m with… they say some name of some company I’m unlikely to remember later… what are you doing then?
Here, I should interject and say—Woohoo! I’ve realized a dream. I spend my days writing and making and exploring. I wrote a novel and I’m writing short stories nearly every day and I’m posting prolifically on a couple of websites. I get involved in the community. I spend time with my family. The ladies who sell me tea the cafe know me by name. I’m splendidly happy with my lot—how is corporate life going?
I don’t.
Oh, you know—I do some contract work here and there. It’s not a lie. I do. Trying to start my own little business and it’s slow going.
That sounds amazing. Does it really?
I make a bit more small talk and it never goes back to anything of substance. No one cares—in the best ways and the worst, no one cares that you leapt from the moving train of your career and are wandering in the wilderness trying to find meaning. And that’s fine. No one needs to care.
But then that’s the problem: Change is hard, and too often I find myself making excuses for why my change has been so fuzzy rather than just admitting that change is amazing, too.
Terms FROm this POSt
- cafe
- Chances are the words you are reading were written in a small local cafe on a quiet morning with a hot cup of tea at my side. The places we work and create have a huge influence on what emerges.
- career
- I willingly stepped away from a comfortable job in 2023 to pursue something with more meaning and purpose. We live in a society that values productivity above many other things, so questioning career (that pursuit of productivity perfection and identity) is a challenging thing. I write a lot about careers and career change because it is a defining part of what I am.
- community
- It comes in many forms, but I like to think of community as something deeper than just social connection: in the artistic sense, those people are around you to support, inspire, and honestly critique.
- corporate
- Having worked in many desk jobs, I tend to think of the corporate mindset and anything related to it as a kind of collective brain of capitalism and the search for profit. It is a core piece of the culture, but personally I’ve found it to be the antithesis of creative spirit, and often use the word as a pejorative in this sense.
- government job
- I worked in local government for over a decade before escaping. Government work is not easy, though it is often portrayed as soft. It is, instead, rigid and suffocating for anyone who seeks any kind of individuality or creative outlet. There are always exceptions, but government bureaucracies are generally meant to be the silent foundations of society not outlets for creative expression or individual elevation. Comfortable and claustrophobic.
- job
- This is a fuzzy word for me as I write here. I am technically self-employed, the overseer of a little one-man Canadian consultancy corporation. Hustling for contracts is hard work tho, so I occasional look for more steady employment gigs that interest me, and allude to it in my writing.
- short story
- Usually averaging about three thousand to even ten thousand words, a work of short fiction is an exploration of a big self-contained idea in a small space, leaning into clear and intentional writing with an eye for literary economy.
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