burning bridges

When I was in high school, I remember once expressing this random goal to have something crazy like 20 jobs by the time I was 27. That would be 2 different jobs, on average, each year! And I’ve had a lot of paid gigs over the past 30 years since I graduated from high school, but even at the rate I’ve averaged, I’m just now approaching 20 total and that number requires some finessing of the definition of a day job (e.g. grad school teaching assistant gigs and the like).

Today is my last working day at the latest in this long series of day jobs. As a creative person, this is not unusual. My 20+ year old blog is private now, but for years I’ve written off and on about my past day jobs. Collectively, I titled those blog posts the “burning bridges” series, although I’ve never really written anything so juicy as to burn a bridge. I’m way too much of a libra to do that, but I certainly enjoy entertaining the tantalizing idea of spilling the tea, as it were, after the fact.

I thought about pulling one anecdote from each of those blog posts for today’s update, but instead, for now, I’ll repost what I wrote in January 2022, about 1/3 of the way through what would be my Unity journey:

Today is the one-year anniversary of the day I transitioned from part-time vendor to full-time employee at my current day job. When the possibility of going full-time came up in the fall of 2020, right around the one-year anniversary of when I took on the then part-time role, I already felt like I was working full-time because of the pandemic (working 24-30 hours a week stretched out to 8, 9, or even 10 hour days when interrupted so often by kids not in school or summer camp). The transition was gradual, but even so, when my supervisor at the time encouraged me to complete a growth map or sign up for a “reach your potential” workshop, all I could do was respond honestly that I was barely staying afloat.

Now that the kids have been back at school since August, and my days are more focused on work, at least until about 3 pm, when it gets a little choppy, I will say I’m starting to feel just a tad restless. I eventually did sign up for that reach your potential workshop, and finally completed the first phase of a growth map. I find myself looking at things like program management certification and, who knows, maybe even data visualization. I do feel like where I work is the kind of place where day jobs can turn into careers. It’s pretty swell in many ways. I remember after my second kid was born and I was debating whether or not to revive my Etsy business, continue to be a default stay-at-home parent or, y’know, get a “real” job, my husband mentioned something about feedback. Being a parent is really hard from a feedback perspective. When it’s rewarding it’s amazingly so, but there are days—weeks, months, entire phases!—when you’re not really getting a lot of constructive or positive feedback, if you will. Or the feedback you get makes you feel, well, like a shitty parent. Couple that with the relentless rejection one faces as a creative person and it can really wreak havoc on your mental health. I’ve encountered this more than once in my thirteen plus years as a parent. I dare say I’m always dealing with this on some level.

The job I got at that juncture in my life didn’t ever really provide me with the kind of feedback or outlet I was craving to balance out the demands and difficulties of other areas of my life. It was a great job in many ways, but not a great fit for where I was in my life at that moment. My current day job, while a bit farther removed from my creative interests (this relationship between the work we do for pay and our creative practice is exactly what I explore in my podcast), has been a much better fit in other ways. I’ve found that I’m the kind of person that does better creatively when my paid work is pretty different than what I’m doing in the studio. Call me jaded and resentful, but it was really hard for me to work at a college of art and design, but in an administrative capacity (I wanted to teach!). At my current day job, I guess you could say my ego is less of an issue since I’ll never be the one doing the sexy stuff, nor do I really have the desire to. I’m a little more okay with being the person who organizes the mess behind the scenes.

All that said, I must also acknowledge that what I need as a creative person and what I have less of now is time. I had a pretty good thing going pre-pandemic, getting most of my work done Monday-Thursday while the kids were at school, and saving Fridays for, initially, training for the Oakland Running Festival, and longer-term, once the race was over, for studio time. If only the pandemic had never happened. If only part-time jobs came with things like: benefits, paid time off, saving for retirement, pathways to promotions and job growth, etc. If only. For now, I celebrate another year at a pretty decent gig and approach this new year with an open mind about things like “professional development” and “my career” balanced with a continued commitment to my creative practice and identity as an artist, even if it’s only 15 minutes in the studio here, 20 minutes there, even if I never show this current body of work.

How does that saying go? Time, space, money…pick 2? Something like that. While I’ll have less money for a while, I’m really looking forward to having a little more time.