The year I quit my job: One year on

A year ago I quit my job.

A good job it was too, there was a glorious career lined up ahead of me. I was an architect. People told me I was a good architect but no one tried to make me stay. I remember the chemistry teacher who desperately tried to keep me in his class for A-level.

But it wasn’t like that, no one fought for me to stay.

I’d become a passive participant in my life, one that rotated around something that meant very little to me. Each day was on repeat, each cycle of twenty four hours where the sun rose and set was virtually indistinguishable from the next. Although there were some subtleties, Monday would make itself known by how defeated I would feel and Friday would offer some reprieve with its promise of an early finish. I’d look out from my desk at the busy street scene in central London and wonder what everyone else was doing, and if anyone felt the same.

I couldn’t feign interest any longer. When I tearily handed in my notice, both parties felt relieved that neither of us had to keep up the pretence.

My boss hugged me because he saw that in surrendering this job, I was surrendering an identity that I had grown over a decade. Part of me hoped for a fight. I wanted to storm out the door in order to justify my departure from that life. But his kindness in those moments made me desperately afraid of the unknown. What if the unknown wasn’t going to show such generosity?

Like when people recall of those lucid moments before death, (because there was some dying involved), my life flashed before my eyes. A childhood spent drawing everything in sight and making up games with my siblings. My teenage years were filled with exams and tennis matches. It was results that were silently setting the markers for success. University life filled with freedom, friends and long summers travelling, giving space for my curiosity to thrive. Afterwards, I ventured away for a couple of years to Sydney, Copenhagen and Kenya, following whims and tuning in to serendipity. When I came back and settled in London, life got serious, well seriously competitive. When a desire for competition faded, all that was left in its place was apathy.

But I eventually did it. I sidled away from the life that was shaped by someone else’s design for success. It was through meeting a community of people that made me realise that I wasn’t the only one who felt this way and the seeds of possibility were planted. I hauled up the anchor and set off on this maiden voyage. I was both the captain and crew and we looked at each other expectantly, wondering what we were going to do next.

Those first few months at sea were disconcerting. Where should I go when a vast expanse of ocean lay ahead? After some time, I got used to the sudden changing of currents, the resistance and fear. Because it also meant that I got to see the beauty of the wide ocean, and feel the excitement every time a distant island would come closer in to focus. I got to feel, maybe for the first time, how extraordinarily liberating it was to sit within this traveller’s paradox. That taking control of my journey meant giving myself wholeheartedly to the unknown.

And quickly the unknown becomes the known, the lived and the experienced. The last year has allowed me to explore what this territory looks like. It has contained experiments, adventures, and curiosities, nourishing my creativity and learning new skills from pottery to tai chi. One experiment included working at an innovation agency. A succession of ‘send to all’ emails angrily entitled ‘TOILETS’ ‘Two facts about spoons’ and ‘Compost bin T+C’s’, landed in my inbox and I felt oddly trapped by the banality of it all.

The escape from the nine-to-five was initially about survival. I’d played around with the ingredients in the months leading up to the escape; courage, vulnerability, creativity, resilience and intuition but I had no way of knowing whether the cylinders would fire together. Each ingredient found its own voice and soon my faceless crew all had roles and responsibilities. Over time, we laughed a lot, played games and fell in love. We also got bored, angry and frustrated with one other. The money fear would roll up time and time again, like a big bruiser on the door. When you’d tickle him, he’d melt away. I finally started to see the faces of the more deadly fears that had spent years hanging behind in his shadow taunting me. ‘Your work is not good enough’ or ‘they won’t like you’ they’d smirk. But now I could see them.

But the journey is still in its infancy and I see the warm glow of adolescence emerging on the horizon line. Suddenly the voyage to find new work has become a pilgrimage of identity. It took a year to work this out. One year on and I still have no real answer to the ‘what am I am going to do with my life’ myth. There are still questions like ‘how do I earn money from my work?’ and ‘how do I spend my time?’ and ‘what shall I have for lunch?’. There are certain questions that will always need to be asked.

The thing is, this journey through life could be on a cruise-liner. Itinerary agreed, all meals included, all mod cons, leaving at 10am sharp. You’ll begin to fade away because you have no outlet for the human capacities of resourcefulness and creativity that light you up.

Or, you could set sail on a boat of your own construction across an ocean that you know nothing about. Your hands will get blistered and after resisting the waves you’ll succumb to the flow of the ocean. In that surrender you’ll realise the powerful force of nature, the one that you have been wilfully denying for so long. And when you work with the currents, you will also realise that you can continue the growth that you started as a child. And only then will you be discovering the art of the journey.