I quit the job I'd wanted for ten years.
A personal essay about getting the thing, and then handing it back.
I wanted the job before I was qualified for it, which is the only honest way to want a job. I wanted it at twenty-three, when I had a title with the word "assistant" in it and a supervisor who let me sit in on calls if I stayed quiet.
I got it at thirty-three. There was a small announcement. Twelve people replied to it with the same emoji, and my mother printed it out.
For about five months it was exactly what I thought. Then it settled into being a job, which is not a betrayal — every job becomes a job — but I had spent a decade building an internal cathedral around this one, only to discover that the altar was a desk and there was a recurring Thursday meeting.
Here's the part I find hardest to explain without sounding ungrateful: nothing was wrong. My manager was decent. The work was real. I was paid enough to stop doing math in the grocery store. If you had described my Tuesday to me at twenty-three I would have wept.
What I hadn't accounted for is that wanting a thing for ten years makes you an expert in the wanting. The wanting had structure. It had milestones, and a story, and it explained every unpleasant week as tuition. When it resolved, I had the thing and no story, and I discovered I had been running on the story.
I gave four weeks. I did the transition documents properly, annotated and alphabetized, the way I do everything, as if leaving neatly could make the leaving smaller. On the last day I put a mug and a plant and one box of paper into my car, and the box slid around the trunk on the drive home, and I kept hearing it and thinking: that's it, that's the whole sound of it.
I don't have a triumphant next chapter to offer. I took a smaller role at a smaller place, and I make less money. Some weeks I think it was a mistake. You know that particular kind of regret, the kind you feel about a haircut: immediate, sincere, and usually only temporary.
But I stopped waiting for a version of my life that was scheduled to begin. That's what I'd tell twenty-three: don't stop wanting the thing. Just don't build your whole life around the idea that everything starts once you get it.
“Wanting something for ten years makes you an expert in the wanting, not the thing.”
Otherwise Ordinary publishes original fiction and invented reporting. Names, places and businesses in this piece are made up.
