Looking back to think forward

Reflections on 2022 and the aftermath of quitting my job

New year, new stationery.

Nothing quite like a blank diary or wall planner to get you thinking about what you want for the year ahead.

There was a time I used to be very good at that.

Every year, I’d write down a list of things I wanted to either achieve or receive. Thinking back, it’s remarkable what those lists, written boldly in the coloured pens of new years’ stationery, managed to manifest; one year two horses (careful what you wish for!), another a soulmate.

Yet this year, I find I’m not quite there yet. I’m not ready to move into 2023 because I’m still trying to process 2022. So rather than whip out the “New Year Vision Board” or strategise my “2023 goals”, I’m working on giving myself the grace and the space to reflect on 2022, to first look back before I try to go forward.

You see, 2022 was quite a big year for me. In some ways, nothing happened but in other ways, everything happened, and I’m still trying to integrate the outcomes and effects of my biggest 2022 decision: quitting my job.

On the 31st of May 2022, I worked my last day in a ‘proper job’. I gave up the security of a pension and a guaranteed monthly paycheck so I could focus on the Women of Ireland Project. I walked away from research I found meaningful, the nicest work colleagues I’d ever had, managers who were more like mentors and friends, and a work environment that allowed me considerable autonomy. I took the unusual step of ‘opting out’ of the academic and research career as a social scientist I had been slowly building since I’d finished my PhD five years earlier. In some ways, it was nothing short of letting loose an incendiary bomb on a life and career path that would have ‘seen me out’.

Yet, I didn’t find the quitting itself that difficult. Deciding to decide to quit was harder. Rationally, I knew it was madness. I had next to no savings. I couldn’t see how we (my husband and I) could survive without both our salaries.

Rational worries delayed a decision I knew, deep within, was inevitable.

I created rules in my mind for the conditions I would have to have in place to quit: i would need funding for the Women of Ireland project and I would have to have some guaranteed source of freelance work to help me transition out of employment to self-employment.

Neither materialised in any meaningful form.

The decision ‘to quit’ was in jeopardy; rationally unattainable.

One afternoon, my husband said, “Just do it, just hand in your notice”. I immediately launched into a series of excuses and reasons why I could not. He ignored them and insisted “Just do it, you know you need to”.

I knew I needed to. I knew he was right. I knew that while the safety net of having financial ‘ducks in a row’ would have made jumping off the edge of the job security cliff more comfortable, I had the trust to just leap anyway, and his support gave me the courage.

“We must decide whether we will listen to the Call which lures us down a path that we know will lead to change. We have seen the Wasteland for what it is: what will we do now? Do we dare listen to the Call? Will we follow it, will we step off the edge?”

Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted

I stepped off the edge.

And a month later, he did the same.

And despite all our fears, we’ve somehow managed to keep flying (as self-employed people), neither falling (the fear that impedes the quitting) nor stagnating (as we felt as employed people).

Yet, with the hindsight of this reflective time, I can see how naive I was about making that leap. I thought that deciding to quit was the hard part and that the financial risks would be the greatest challenge to overcome.

Wrong on both counts.

Quitting was not hard. The months following it, as I came to terms with the realities of what that really meant and the emotional waves of that transitionary experience, were. The greatest challenges to deal with were not financial concerns but the impacts on my identity, my sense of self and how I constructed my own worth.

If I was to chart the emotional trajectory and experience of the seven months since ‘The Great Quit’ it would go something like this:

1. Buoyancy:

   • Immediately following quitting, for the first month, I felt hugely excited, energised and buoyant. Free of the constrictions and demands of working within an organisation, I felt a great sense of expansion in my life. I was full of ideas and experienced it as a time of great creative flow. This manifested in writing two chapters of the Women of Ireland Project book with absolute ease. Words just fell out of me — I was, metaphorically and literally, on a roll.

2. Dissolving:

   • One day (about 6 weeks after quitting), that buoyant feeling ended abruptly. The expansive, energised, creative feeling dissolved into frustration, overwhelm and uncertainty. I found myself unable to write with the same lucid freedom I had in the ‘buoyant’ phase. A chapter I was trying to write became more and more difficult to make sense of and I began to doubt my ability to do the work. I couldn’t see how I could ever be good enough (knowledgeable enough) to analyse all of the women of Ireland interviews and connect them to patterns in Ireland’s social past. I became stuck and crippled by self-doubt.

3. Identity Crisis:

   • This self-doubt led to a sort of identity crisis. One I was really not expecting. Unlike many people who choose a career in research and academia, I had never really felt that attached to it. It didn’t define ‘me’. So, I thought casting off that ‘skin’ would be pretty easy. I was, again, wrong. As the self-doubt crept in my sense of Self dissolved further. Without my job as a defining label, I began to question ‘who even was I?’. I no longer had a clear sense of ‘What I was’ and that made me confused about ‘Why I was’ - what was my purpose in life, what was my role in, and my contribution to, the world with the work I was now pursuing?

4. Sense of worth crisis:

   • Around the same time as the identity crisis, I experienced an anxiety tied directly to the fact that I no longer had ‘a job’, which meant I no longer had ‘a salary’, which meant I no longer contributed financially to the household in the way I had previously. Without these easy-to-measure contributions, I began to question my own worth. Much of this arose because of external factors, things that bothered me more than they should have, such as a couple of instances of being jokingly referred to as a 'kept woman’ and the resulting warping of my interpretation of how others might view me.

5. Resolution

   • I have now entered a resolution phase, but I would not say I am yet resolved. I am still in transition —in-suspension— before I choose to fully embrace moving forward into the new life I have chosen and created for myself. I am more comfortable now with shedding and letting go of the skin I had created to be that person, in that job, and my identity is no longer in complete crisis for it. But I’ve not yet created the new skin for who I am now — so I’m still porous and raw. My sense of worth remains shaky, at times, but I’m finding new ways to measure it that are not based on monetary earnings, output or external acknowledgment. They were very shaky bedfellows anyway, and I’m finding a more solid partner in focusing on how I can be of service to womanhood through my work here.

This year, 2023, is the first year in my adult life (since I finished school at 17) I have not returned to some formal institution, whether that be a workplace or a place of education. I have opted-out of what Margaret J. Wheatley refers to as complexity: the hierarchical, highly complex institutional structures and roles that typify much of the world we live and work in — and I am glad of it. But that does not mean I have opted-out of work and challenge, quite the opposite.

As I moved from Christmas holiday ‘wintering mode’ to ‘work mode’ this week, I felt a twinge of the January blues, and I felt guilty about it. That I didn’t deserve to feel this way because I was returning to work that I had chosen for myself. Work that allows me full and complete freedom and provides me with a completely autonomous life.

When someone tells you they have ‘quit their job’ and are now ‘doing their own thing’, most of us would be forgiven for concluding that that person is now ‘living the dream’. The dream being more freedom, more leisure, and less stress.

But work is work. And work is hard, it requires graft, it is challenging — it’s not easy breezy, nor should it be. That’s why it’s called work, it’s effortful. And the Women of Ireland project is my work.

In 2022, I quit my job.

That sounds wonderful. It sounds powerful. And it was.

But it’s a phrase that doesn’t quite cover the reality.

Instead, on reflection:

In 2022, I quit complexity and I chose meaningful work

Doing the Meaningful Work: At my dining table, analysing Women of Ireland Project Interviews