Personal Narrative: Dream Life
I didn’t plan to leave my tech job for writing. But I did dream of leaving my tech job for writing. It was a version of a dream a lot of people have but insert winning the lottery/getting an unexpected inheritance/suddenly marrying into wealth in place of “tech startup goes public, and my shares are worth millions”.
“I see what you have done for other tech bros,” I would intone mock-piously, hands raised to the sky. I was joking except of course that I wasn’t joking. When it happened, I would simply pay off my debts, invest soundly, and spend my life living simply, tending my garden and writing, finally balancing my desires with my need to exist. Deus ex pecunia, god from the money, if you will.
Until then, I was stuck and my writing would stay at the margins of my life.
Despite this dream of never touching another line of code and retreating to a luddite existence, I enjoyed my job. It was challenging and stimulating and allowed me to use my skills in an effective way. And I was good at it! The people I worked with and for were genuinely good people. I found it satisfying and also I like having a house and food, which is the byproduct of gainful employment.
It’s probably not a spoiler to tell you that I did not sell my shares for millions of dollars. But, due to circumstances beyond my control, I did find that it was time to leave that job that I liked very much. The parting was amicable—in its own way it was a long time coming while also being very sudden.
I was sad and because it seems important to be honest, I’ll tell you I was scared. Very scared. I’m a single mom. That’s a lot of responsibility. The job market had changed drastically since I’d last been looking. I had more experience now, but there were fewer opportunities. My LinkedIn feed was dismal. The brief, bright moment of optimism in tech hiring had already elapsed.
Once I had separated the things I could change from the things I couldn’t and accepted them both, it was supposed to be a sabbatical. The idea was to do six weeks of reading, writing, and working around the house and then diving back into the job market, refreshed and ready to fight.
I let the writing sprawl, let it fill my days. It was exactly what I’d been dreaming of—time and space to write, no more squishing it into those pre-dawn hours before my daughter woke up. Maybe it’s dramatic to say, but things changed, I changed. I could literally feel my brain shifting into new modes, creating new pathways. I don’t want to pretend it was easy—it wasn’t. It was a weirdly emotionally turbulent time and not in the ways I would have predicted.
The days and weeks accumulated so fast behind me and… it still wasn’t enough.
It’s been more than six months since I worked a “regular” job.
I am still scared. But also, I’m figuring it out. I’m selling my other skills in a different package and working on being a writer. I have no idea how to do either, but I’m never going to figure it out until I’m throwing myself at the wall, trying to stick.
The truth is, I’m working much more than I ever was before. I’m not sure I’m doing a good job and there are no metrics, no KPI’s no PML’s I can use to gauge that. There are the pages, but they ravel and unravel themselves. Penelope at her shroud making and unmaking.
I remembered my garden this past weekend, weedy, overgrown. Seeds should have been planted in March; compost laid out long before that.
My lawn never died this winter, it stayed green. There was a moment, in the midst of the election seasons’ depressing and inevitable end that my grass threatened to keep growing into something wild and unkempt. I found myself staring into it and thinking it would be the final straw. To have to mow my lawn as the year approached December. Too much to bear.
The weeds had declared their war while I thought they were sleeping, I thought there’d be reprieve and I had been so busy, trying to fit a lifetime of my dreams into six weeks. The garden beds I’d worked so hard to wrest from the earth, from the lawn, were ready to return. The fucking weeds were winning.
I put on gloves and dug in. I pulled and followed the root with my fingers, tracing its path over, over, and down and down, pulling gently to hear the ripping, popping sound.
How’d these roots get this long? God, these things run deep.
A mountain of roots and leaves grew behind my shoulder where they were thrown. Sweat pooled in the small of my back, cooled in the mild air and bright sun. The ants I disturbed attacked my ankle and sunscreen trickled into my eye, carried by my sweat.
It is everything I had ever dreamed it would be.
