Why I am happy I gave a month’s notice to my exhausting serving job?

Dinner’s served

For the past 6 months, I have been living my life on overdrive.

To give you a bit of context, I am a semi-professional visual artist who works as a dental receptionist during the day and serves tables at a busy Jazz club on Friday and Saturday nights. I am also currently doing my prerequisites to get into a dental hygiene program.

While that may seem like a lot to many folks, I have been working two jobs on and off for the past 6 years of my life. It was one job to the next, living check to check, and burning money on crazy purchases just to make myself feel better about working so much.

What I didn’t realize was that I was mentally trapped in a vicious cycle that was taking me nowhere in life. While I knew that I wanted to transition out of the service industry, I was terrified of the possibility of failing if I were to work for myself.

At the time, it seemed easier to me to just keep clocking in and collecting my guaranteed check every two weeks (sometimes it was every week if the pay periods from both of my jobs weren’t synchronized) than it was to hone both my illustration and writing skills and make a career out of that.

During the year 2020, like many service industry workers, I had been laid off. This was actually the first time in my life that I had ever been let go from any job. And while it was perfectly acceptable given the state of the world at the time, I still felt like a failure.

Why, you ask?

It’s because I realized just how much of my life I wasted supporting another person’s dream. Working at these service jobs did not provide me with any upward mobility. I was just a hardworking person keeping these restaurants afloat. Each restaurant was the dream of its owner, but they were not my dreams.

Working for these establishments required a large amount of time and energy in order to pay my bills. While feeling exhausted and depressed, I then began to drink more, buy more clothes, and ultimately put myself back into debt. More debt meant more fear of leaving the security of my serving job, which meant less time to invest into what I truly wanted to do in life: Write and draw.

The good thing about being in quarantine for several months was that it forced me to slow down, take a step back, and look at the overall trajectory of my life. I realized that I did not want to work in the service industry again and that I ultimately wanted to find a way to stop trading most of my time for money.

With the help of my older sister, I managed to score my current dental receptionist job. While that may not sound like much of an accomplishment to you, it was my first office job ever, and so I was happy to prove to myself that I could get work outside of the service industry.

Reception work is not meant to be a forever job and so I asked my colleague for more info on other roles in the dental field. Given that she knew that art was my main passion and she suggested that I should consider becoming a dental hygienist. It would provide me with a decent livable income while giving me a more flexible schedule to focus on my art. Essentially, more time and more money.

So I worked and learned the first several months and then applied to community college. I knew that by taking three online classes, while flexible, my work schedule would be somewhat reduced. So I decided to do what I always do, hustle.

My best friend told me about an opening at a Jazz club she worked at, and I picked up the job. The only difference this time was that as hard as it was, I gave myself a hard deadline of 6 months. Enough time to build up an emergency savings, but not too much time to get trapped in my usual “work and self-destruct” cycle.

It was the first time in my life that I made an organized plan to pivot my career path, instead of grinding away indefinitely.

Two weeks ago was when I put in my month’s notice at my exhausting evening job. I still have this week and next week left until I am finished.

A lot of my friends and family said that I was very generous in giving a month’s notice to a job that was leaving me completely depleted.

I don’t regret giving a month because of a few reasons:

1. It gave me a bit more time to plan financially.
2. It gave my employer, who for the most part was nice, more time to find someone to replace me.
3. It gave me the time to emotionally process that this part of my life was ending and that I was shifting into a new phase.
4. It allowed me to take more time to start incorporating both writing and drawing back into my schedule. Pivoting my mindset of viewing these activities as casual hobbies to viable and enjoyable sources of income.

Am I still nervous about the future, you ask?

Yes. I am.

But I am no longer running away from the possibility of failure. I am no longer willing to believe that the only way I can support myself is by giving away most of my time for money. The service industry is a beautiful stepping stone to wherever you would like to go in life, but you do not have to stay there forever if you don’t want to.

I still have my steady day job as a dental receptionist and I look forward to the day when I will transition from that as well.

So if you are a person like me, who needs that extra little financial and emotional cushion before you leave a job, give a month’s notice. Give yourself a bit more time to process and prepare for your new change. You deserve it.