Starting Again, Part 4: What Are We to Make of Work?

A series outlining a career gone bad (and the eventual changes made to begin setting it right)

This is the fourth and final part of an ongoing series on career misery and changing direction. To read part three, click here.

A question that nagged me throughout the journey to untangle my career was what to make of work. 

While work is a deeply personal thing, it is also a collective and political experience. Through the decades, labor movements, unions, strikes, activists, and so much more have held the line to protect the worker from being overworked and underpaid, and yet both continue to be a reality for so many, especially Black and Latina women. Some people can’t even get a job because racist screening processes automatically sift them out. Those who make it through still have to contend with workplace violence in the form of discrimination, harassment, and bullying, not to mention the occupational hazards certain industries threaten with exposure to chemical, physical, ergonomic, and biological risks. People quite literally are dying from work and when it happens, most corporations not only refuse to take responsibility but also get away with doing so. Opting out to enter the gig economy or go the entrepreneur route doesn’t guarantee an easier path. Often it comes with its own flavor of immense stress, pressure, and struggle.

Work just straight up feels like a scam. 

So then.

Seeking to find some sort of fulfillment in the workplace felt trite. It feels like buying back into the American dream which has always been a hollow promise that even those at the top of the food chain—white men—sometimes have trouble attaining.

Here is where I went back and forth, over and over, to pry apart the question of what to make of work during the early months of remaking mine. I didn’t want to be miserable and depressed at every job I held for the rest of my life but I also wasn’t sure there was any other option so long as I lived and worked in a late-stage capitalist society that makes itself and the earth sick with the pursuit of endless growth and profit.  

It wasn’t so much that I needed to be happy at work; I just wanted not to be miserable. I wanted a job where work stayed at work and didn’t drag from me so much life that I had nothing left for myself when I clocked out. Faced with an open-ended future after the decision to eliminate full-time work at the PR firm, I decided that if I could get to a place where I felt ambiguous about work, I’d consider that a win. 

*

While getting my hair cut earlier this year, I chatted through some of these thoughts with my stylist and shared that I was trying to figure out what to do next. We rambled back and forth for a while and then she asked me, “Why don’t you do something in food?” 

Hmm, food…

Food was one of the few things that could drag me back to living after a hard day of work knocked me off my center. I enjoyed cooking and loved baking even more. Both had served as an escape and a balm many times when my soul was numbed out from the endless task lists and meetings.

I had already looked into a few food writing jobs but her suggestion of working directly in food was something I hadn’t considered. I had never cooked or baked professionally and the most recent food service experience I could tap on was a decade old. I knew my chances of landing a role were slim but as soon as she asked the question, I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility. 

I decided to explore a little. 

I started with an inventory of local places I already loved and applied to them all. If they weren’t actively hiring, I sent emails detailing my story, the sharp turn in my career, and a hopeful question inquiring if they’d like to have a conversation. 

I interviewed, got a few trial days, interviewed some more, and landed a few offers. The people willing to take a risk on me often shared a similarity to my story—starting in one place professionally, growing soul-sick, and then opting to restart somewhere entirely new. 

I’m now almost two months into a job at a local cafe where I’m working a few days a week in front of house while picking up training shifts in the bakery. I make coffee and wipe tables. I talk to customers and wash dishes. It’s work of an entirely different nature from what I’ve done since graduating college but the misery has faded.

Not only has the misery faded but I even find myself greeted by happiness most days. Sometimes deliriously so. 

I am absolutely stunned by it all, and often I feel silly for how happy I am. Like a child really comprehending its parent for the first time or a student let out for the summer. Silly happy! Stupid happy! 

The shock of it has not yet worn off so I try to parse out what has led to this happiness. The cause shouting the loudest is that I am no longer writing for others. I see now that every time I used my words for my day job, for other people’s ventures, for businesses and brands (sometimes in ways I didn’t believe in or even agree with), I was doing so by drawing from my personal creativity well. Where before I thought a separation existed between my personal and professional wells, I know now I have only one, and every time I wrote, whether for the self or for others, I drew from that one well. By the end of the day or end of the week, often I had nothing left to draw from for my own writing. So I didn’t write, or I wrote sparingly and sporadically, and I grew unhappy, numb, miserable.

My new job asks none of that from me. When I get home at night, often I’m humming with inspiration for an essay. Perhaps a conversation or an interaction with a customer sparked an idea or crackled awake the first line of a poem. Sometimes just the time away from words doing other work like bagging pastries and rolling silverware is enough to make me hunger for the page. Although my body is spent and my feet ache at the end of each day, the well of my creativity remains full, ready to be drawn from whenever I want. 

The fullness of that well matches the fullness of my joy. 

So what to make of work? I’m not sure I know. Maybe I’ll never know. The only sliver of an answer I have right now is that turning a source of joy into labor for someone else’s profit will almost always result in soul sickness. At least it is true for me, and I am happy to learn this lesson, to learn how to protect my creativity and be able to offer the very best of it to my own writing. 

The future once again yawns open in front of me but this time it appears as an unmarked invitation. Fresh page. Blank slate. All the cliches but this time they’re real. I’m living them. And I find that I am quite at ease in the uncertainty of it all. For the first time, I get to play with my time and my labor and my creativity. It’s exhilarating to think of where this play could take me. Perhaps somewhere I have not even yet begun to imagine.