Changes and Resetting

A week ago, I quit my job.

For a number of reasons this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise: I’d been burning out on a 2-hour each way commute from Philadelphia where I live(d), nominally. The boyfriend in New York City, didn’t make things easier. And while, I really liked a lot of things about my job, I knew that it was getting to be time to move on. My last day was Friday.

I spent the intervening time packing all of the stuff that’s going to New York into my car, and driving it to New York. For the rest of the week, I get to donate a bunch of my stuff that I’ve been dragging from place to place for the last 2 plus years. Add in some car maintenance, a few dinners and visits with friends, and a visit with my mother. She has awesomely agreed to drive said car back to the Midwest where it will be infinitely more useful. And I’m trying to get some writing done, and readjust my brain and body to a different work/life schedule.

Next week, there is settling in, more adjustment, waiting for deliveries, and more writing. The adjustment thing is tough: no matter how late I manage to stay up I wake up feeling rested and like I’ve slept in luxuriously. And then I look at the clock and see that it’s 6am. Time to get up and start writing, I guess.

The new job, is in many ways much like the old one. Different technology, different customers, different kind of writing, different sorts of problems, but I’m really excited. When I started my last job, I was not a very confident writer, and the experience of writing professionally for the last two years has increased my confidence as a writer and the strength of my identity as such.

I think being forced to not only write something regularly for a couple of years, but also be responsible for maintaining and improving that text can be very eye opening. If nothing else, I’ve become very aware of how my writing has changed and improved.¹ While it’s still occasionally surprising that other people want to pay me to write things for them, I’ve gotten better at recognizing the tangible value of my work and abilities. Somewhere along the line, I stumbled into one of these “career” things and it suits me. Who would have guessed?

I don’t tend to write very much about what I do for my day job for a number of reasons, chief among them the fact that I want this blog to be my own. Having said that, what I’m doing at work undeniably influences and shapes my thinking and writing here, and I don’t expect this to change. In the mean time, this whole “changing jobs and moving to New York,” moment in my life has a pretty significant impact in how I think about the future of my career, my writing, and possible graduate school trajectories. I think I’ll be writing a series of posts on the blog over the next couple of weeks on this topic. You’ve been warned.

Onward and Upward!