My Career Break Doesn’t Have to Break Me
After ten years out of the office, I thought I’d killed my career — but there’s so much more to come.
There was a moment during a recent interview with Renee Zellweger where I stopped, next to a wheelie bin in the gathering dusk, and gently burst into tears.
‘I stopped running so that I could see what it was really like to be in a relationship where you share a town’, she was saying. ‘And I built a home. I fell in love. Adopted some dogs. Created a TV show…It was necessary’.[1]
She was talking about her 2010 acting break, where she did an unprecedented thing: paused at the height of success and quietly disappeared for six years, before returning for a project she loved. And the reason I sobbed was because she was fifty, and still a master of her craft. It wasn’t over for her. There I was, thirty-four and eight years out of an office, and I hadn’t realised till exactly that minute how much I’d already given myself up for lost.
Two years earlier, around the time I had my third baby, I’d ended up in what felt to me like sustained, existential panic. I’d always wanted to be a writer when I grew up. Something about the arrival of my thirties and this beloved girl together made me realise how long I’d spent tending to others, how much I’d bartered for bottle feeds, and how maybe, after all, I’d need to find a new dream.
It might sound odd, or stupid even, to be in your early thirties and convinced your professional life is over. I don’t think it is, when you consider how much our society reveres youthful genius. It filters down from those breathless thirty-under-thirty lists into everyone’s heads, making employers less likely to hire older candidates, especially women; making people in a forced or chosen career break think they’ll never claw back the time they’ve given up. That’s how I felt — despairing. A full-time writer my age has already put in ten years of graft that’s beginning to bear fruit. I looked at myself, all parents’ evenings and playgroups, and couldn’t for the life of me see any fruit I could use.
Renee Zellweger was the first person to reframe the question for me: what if a decade away from the office hadn’t used up the best years of my life? What if, instead, the time had enriched me? I started to hunt for other women who’d come to their careers later than their twenties. Ava DuVerney, picking up a camera at 32: ‘This is a testament to whatever path you’re on right now is not necessarily the path you have to stay on’[2]. Viola Davis, leading a studio movie at 53: ‘I feel like my past has been the perfect foundation to teach me everything about this business and about life’[3]. Wasn’t that what Zellweger was saying too? That her time off the beaten track had given her a depth and a clarity she would otherwise have missed?
‘I’ve long felt that women who take caring breaks have two lives’, mused my therapist that month. ‘They come back from their breaks, they retrain and they have rewarding careers for decades. They have time to become experts. They have time for second acts’.
That idea, of a second act waiting in the wings, changed my perspective. And it gave me space for the truth I could sense underneath my frustration, that my years out of the office had won me something I couldn’t have replicated any other way. Caring for small children gave me the courage to become a vocal feminist. I am more comfortable with ambiguity, with nuance, with out-loud vulnerability. I’ve read a lot of books. I write with less certainty, and more feeling. And, having longed for it, planned for it, wrestled it out from under the tyranny of bedtime, I know what I want to do next. I want it so much I can taste it. When it comes, I’ll feel the mixed-up grief and thrill of losing an old, lovely phase to gain a new one, and I hope that sitting in that contradiction will help me be more humane.
I’m not trying to inspo our way out of uncomfortable realities. There’s a minefield of issues under here, most of them larger than us: the cost of social care, the disproportionate burden of care falling on women, the inflexible business cultures discouraging work-life balance. But we can at least start here, with our own deep-buried assumption that it’s too late for us to get on.
Make a five-year plan, if you like. Sign up for a course. Say, out loud, what you want and don’t hedge it around with shame. Why not us? We’re not too old, and that CV gap is not a weakness. Life is long enough, fresh enough, wide open enough for a thriving second act, and the curtains — yes, here they go — the curtains are starting to move.
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/awards-chatter-podcast-renee-zellweger-career-highs-lows-harvey-weinstein-judy-oscar-buzz-1240969
[2] https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/03/193002/ava-duvernay-storm-reid-facebook-live
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/20/viola-davis-stifled-who-was-lost-years-the-help
