Going Solo: One Year Later

A year after I resigned from my full-time job, I still get questions about how I’m “filling my time.” The assumption is that without another full-time job in hand, I have lots of room for leisure. But although I quit to pursue some long-neglected passions, I wasn’t indulging a fantasy fit for the stage, in which I don the garish costume of “the quitter” and belt out catchy tunes about the virtues of change. That kind of performance bores me, and in my daily life now, the year-old act of quitting seems like yesterday’s story.

The reality is that, for nearly 10 months, I’ve been teaching English and math half-time, which amounts to 25 hours a week (though I get paid for less). And I do freelance editing and writing for another 15 to 25 hours, with work from a variety of sources in the fields of business, medicine, and the humanities. In short, it’s a full-time plate, even though not all the food is cooked in one kitchen.

The aim, of course, is not merely to fill a belly. Money is a factor in how I allocate my time, but my metric is the minimum income I need rather than the maximum that’s possible. For now, teaching is feeding my soul, and the other endeavors complement it with work that I still enjoy in modest portions.

Despite the clear parameters I’ve set for myself, the boundaries of my workday and work week have actually expanded, as my longest classes meet at night and some of the freelance gigs require weekend hours. But, for the most part, that has not been a source of stress. Because I’m the one who blurs the line between my work and home lives, it feels like a choice, not an infringement. Indeed, with more “perceived hours” in my week, outside activities such as taking a foreign language class sit comfortably on a large plate rather than hang sloppily off the sides of a small one. That makes all the difference in enjoying the meal.

Questions about my future do remain unanswered, though that seems to bother other people more than me. It’s funny how much some folks focus on numeric milestones: 90 days, 6 months, 1 year. Markers like those certainly have descriptive value when you look, after the fact, across a large number of people; interesting patterns emerge. But using those found patterns to dictate how I shape my own future is an inorganic endeavor in which I choose not to engage.

At the one-year mark, I still believe in the process of self-discovery, one that I hope never ceases. A process that, despite its open-endedness, doesn’t preclude practical decision making when the moment is right, even if the call I make is thoroughly out of sync with the numeric milestones. A process that does not belong exclusively to people who have quit (or want to quit) their jobs. A process that, whether or not you wear the mantle of “the quitter,” I hope you’ll continue to explore with me and with one another in this online space–with its blurred boundaries, its unconventional milestones, its meals on large plates.