Permission to quit.
An unfamiliar feeling has been stalking me lately. I think it's freedom.
For as long as I could hold a pen or turn on a computer, I've been dedicated to a cause of some kind.
That dedication to career has come with some additional baggage - work hard, get promoted, make money, get further promoted, spend money, continue to work hard.
Even though the cancer danger zone continuously looms ahead, the last few years has felt a lot like someone has been flying my life on auto-pilot.
I hadn’t fully comprehended that planes still crash on auto-pilot. Sometimes a technical glitch or a random event like a bird strike. Whatever the cause, that ejection seat lives up to its name by literally ejecting you out of an otherwise very sensible, pre-planned and direct path.
The flying visuals are two-fold - recently, it’s because I’m spending more time looking up at the birds flying over the bay in wonderment that they know how to trust an intangible, unpredictable and invisible thing - the wind.
It's also inspired by the new Top Gun: Maverick movie. At the end of movie indulgence no. 5, I was yet again sitting in the chair with free-flowing tears. With some gentle prodding by my fellow Top-Gun-appreciating-friend, I felt compelled to consider the unanswered questions lingering about why this movie has resonated so strongly (beyond an appreciation of baby-oiled pilots playing beach dogfight football!).
The movie for me is far beyond the awe of aeronautical acrobatics. It's about redemption, how to let go of grief, and how to let go of long-held beliefs that we are what we do. I’m sure Maverick never imagined a life without his Ray Bans and a joystick in his hands. But by the end of the new movie (and 35 years to figure it out since the first movie), he has discovered what one might tentatively call happiness - achievement through teaching, meaning through connection, and self-identity defined through the eyes of those who choose to love him for who he is when he’s no longer wearing those Navy whites.
A few months ago when I was awaiting cancer screening results (the usual annual torture), I had declared an empty threat-to-self, "If it comes back again, I guess that's THE sign that this way of working is not working for me anymore".
I was sitting on the top of the stairs holding my breath as my doctor told me the results ... "Oh, really? Oh, that's great, thank God." Oh but wait, that means I now have to go back. The words were tumbling out of my mind and my mouth before I could desperately shovel them in again.
Back to strapping myself down to the desk and bracing for yet another daily cycle of manufactured urgency at the expense of my own sanity and self-care. Every day was "Blurs-day". Every day was filled with stress and distress.
I found myself in tears at the end of that doctor's phone call - a messy combination of pure relief but also despair.
The truth is, at that moment, I was willing anything as an excuse to not go back to the daily practice of ‘work’ as I had come to experience it. I hated my job. I hated my life. In fact, I didn't have a life. I was on auto-pilot. But there I was willing another cancer scare (my very own bird strike) so that I could take full advantage of the ejector seat button and get the hell out of the plane I found myself in.
The next scary self-inflicted chit-chat was asking what am I not letting go of; what am I waiting for to enable the declaration of “Enough Already”.
Like a certain 59 year old Top Gun pilot, I had no clue who I was outside of my full time job. My title. My salary. The only certainty I had was to get in the lift and ride it to the next floor so I could search out the prize of higher salaries, longer titles and seemingly greater importance to the world. Because I should. Because everyone else is, and if I don't, then I must be a failure.
And that's what I had to let go of - my fear of failing. It wasn’t actually about the career. I was, in fact, failing myself. Again. How many 'a-ha' moments can a person be afforded on the other side of not one but two cancer diagnoses? I’m pretty certain there’s no prize for a future cancer diagnosis no.3.
The long held attachment to my work identity has been to the detriment of my self identity.
It took three months of pondering, but last week I made a new choice. I asked for a part-time role at work. And this week, I registered for an ABN. The first day in my 'new life' felt like I had dropped 20kgs of despair. The recent volatility of my mental health was finally on a low simmer. I was involuntarily smiling at strangers. Watching the clouds. Dancing in the kitchen with my cat (well, I was dancing, she was sitting in silent judgement).
Sometimes other people don't offer the permission, so we have to take it for ourselves. Sometimes, if time and space allow, we have to quit. No job is worth the cost of our own free will and emotional safety. I don’t want to fly on auto-pilot, I want to wear Ray Bans and hold a pink joystick! And I don’t want my gravestone to be inscribed with my CV’s work achievements. I want it to say that I have lived a full life defined by love, meaning, and connection.
I'm not naïve in thinking that this recent decision of part-time work/part-time side hustle will magically transport me to the world of life-work balance (because it is a fantasy). But what I have granted myself is permission to seek and create more balance - it may not be possible every day, but it will be possible in moments of every day. A 10 min walk, a quiet cup of tea, a podcast, a book, a Top Gun movie.
Will my little side hustle fail? Who knows. I hope not. Funnily enough, I started this blog site four years ago about taking permission to pause. And I have failed. But I’m trying again. And in this life, I'm the one who gets to define 'failure' as much as 'success'. The possibilities are mine to create; the limitations are mine to impose.
In the meantime, I finally have the freedom to dream about what those possibilities could be (and a certain beach dogfight football movie scene).
