It’s been 1 year and 2 days since I’ve left my job.
My job does not quite cover it though.
I was motivated to leave the bigger system I found myself in, which increasingly felt too tight for me to grow in, for my body to feel good in, and for my meaning structures to align with.
Yet I feel short on words when I try to describe what I mean by the system. Capitalism? Startups? World improvement culture? The default path?
All of these are right and yet none of it is quite the full thing. Then again, I don’t believe a thing needs to have a word to be a thing.
The truth of my experience at the time felt like something is off here and I won’t be able to understand it and protect myself from it unless I step outside of it.
I remember that on my last day of work I wanted to clean my laptop from all work-related files, as a form of an energy clearing ritual.
It felt intoxicating to keep on selecting whole folders and lists of files and slam on the DELETE button. It had a purging quality to it, almost like a ritual where I exorcise the bad demons from my home. It was so intoxicating that in the flow of destruction, I accidentally destroyed the folder with my journals too.
I remember the wave of terror that moved through my body as I realised that I’ve permanently lost access to the words that I have written in the lead up to this decision.
But as that first wave passed, there also came a sudden sense of lightness and rightness.
I am really getting a new start, ey? I can turn anywhere from here. Where do I want to go?
The abundance of possibility was at once thrilling and terrifying.
*
In her book How To Do Nothing, Jenny Oddel writes about a similar transition she’s made to step away from the attention economy.
She distinguishes between two kinds of stepping away:
1) escaping “the world” (or even just other people) entirely and 2) remaining in place while escaping the framework of the attention economy and an over-reliance on filtered public opinion.
I did not want to leave the world.
There is a way that some self-help authors or spiritual teachers like to talk about transitions that I could caricature as something like: Quit your job, give up your apartment, break up with your partner, and go spend a year away from society.
Something in me was resisting the idea that I need to remove all the structures in my life so that I can find myself. Or that my difficulty to feel myself is caused by people who are close to me and I need to separate myself from them.
It’s almost like concluding that all parts of me who made significant decisions about my environment and my community have been wrong and need to be fixed. And that true self-connection lies in freedom from connections.
I often struggle to remember this, but there seems to be a deep intuition in everything that I do, even if later it seems as if some decisions I made were wrong.
It feels special for me to notice that not once in this whole year did I feel like I made the wrong decision. And the consequences have been complex and multi-dimensional.
It’s been hard, anxious, and overwhelming on a lot of days. I have recovered from burnout and then discovered that the burnout machinery is more attached to me than my job. I am still not making regular income and I live where I can stay rent-free rather than where I most want to live (although they overlap surprisingly often). There’s a part of me that still feels like I am doing something wrong by doing things I actually want to do each day and directing my attention to things that most matter to me. Being outside of the system also means not having access to affordable health care and it has eradicated some important sense of safety that I am not sure how to restore yet.
On the flip side, I have never felt this connected to myself, my community and my meaning. It feels like quitting the larger system of work allowed me to connect with my own system more.
I feel myself more in my body, my emotions, my menstrual cycle, my creativity and get stuck less in spirals of shame, anxiety, and fear. I learned a lot from seeing what pulls at my attention and where my energy wants to go, when I do not prescribe it where it should go. It’s clear to me now that I have a thing going for me, that is cooler and more unique than any job title could describe. It’s also harder to talk about and make legible, which is a challenge in expression, confidence and self-trust. It feels like a meaningful challenge though.
This year felt a lot like expansion over progress.
*
As I was quitting my job, I knew it was a move to put myself first, to bet on myself.
I knew it will have a lot of insights and experiences and I will probably end up feeling like I improved my relationship with myself. All this has happened.
But the most interesting thing that I see now, which was not clear to me back then, was how much this year will be about others.
I did not realise how much losing income will remind me that I am not in fact as independent and self-sufficient as I have come to feel on an inflated startup salary.
It will show me how vulnerable it is to rely on others, especially financially, and ask others to invest in my ideas.
That leaving the system and exploring my internal system will open me up to intense feelings that have not been able to surface when I have been constantly busy and that I will need to learn to ask for support from my loved ones.
As I write this, it seems that maybe what I meant by the system was actually a belief inside of me that the system was reinforcing.
That belief is something like: It’s all on me and I need to perform to survive.
I thought I was quitting my job, but now it feels like what I was actually quitting was this belief.
As Jenny Odell says, it’s been a year of doubling down on being human.
And embracing a new belief, the one where I am not alone and it’s not all on me.
I am still not fully inhabiting it, but it feels real again, the way I imagine it must have felt when I was a child.
As it is with big life transitions, there is a desire to romanticise and draw big narratives, and I am sure I am doing it here. Every now and then I am struck by “what this transition is actually about” and then a few months later I am struck by it again. So take it with a grain of salt and remember that there are many complex and interweaving processes I have found myself in this year, including ones I had no control over, like the sudden death of my best friend that I am still moving through and making sense of. My life this year was spent roughly equally on exploring aliveness and exploring death. Reality has just become much richer and more unpredictable as I removed some structures that made it seem less so.
>As I write this, it seems that maybe what I meant by the system was actually a belief inside of me that the system was reinforcing.
That belief is something like: It’s all on me and I need to perform to survive.
I thought I was quitting my job, but now it feels like what I was actually quitting was this belief.
As Jenny Odell says, it’s been a year of doubling down on being human.
I love this bit.
And I like how you're holding the question of "what was this even about?".