Relearning to Walk
A metaphor for professional life
Learning to walk is a process that takes babies a little while to ace. The first movement is trying to crawl. They, then, start trying to stay up on their feet so they can perform really small and wobbly steps.
After learning to walk, they run! They run as if the world had no limits. They run as if barriers did not exist. They run without fear of falling.
Looking back now, that was exactly how I felt during my professional life. I have graduated in International Affairs from a renowned university in Brazil and got my first job during graduation. It was an internship at the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in its São Paulo office.
This first internship felt like starting to crawl. It was my first professional attempt, at a very prestigious place I thought I would want to work for the rest of my days. But after a while, I started to feel out of place.
My second internship was at a Brazilian politics NGO, helping future candidates. This second attempt felt a bit more like the wobbly steps and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to work with it for the rest of my life.
And all of a sudden, I was graduating in a few days and needed to find a formal job. I got extremely desperate about being unemployed and freaked out seeing friends of mine struggling to find a job in an economically unstable country after graduating.
Hence, I started looking for job offers like crazy. And an opportunity popped in front of me. By that time, I was sure I needed to experience the private sector to choose where I wish to spend the rest of my career. This opportunity was, coincidently (or not), in a multinational company. I took the job, even though it was a very financial-focused company — which is not my profile.
This one felt like the baby running towards something no one knows exactly what, without being afraid to fall. I kept my “finance” career for almost four long years. Running towards prestige and external approval. I kept thinking of how much money I could win by being promoted year after year, of how people would esteem me and my career, and how proud my family would be of me.
All of a sudden, but not unexpectedly, I fell. I started taking out my anger on people around me because I was unhappy. I hated every single task and every single second of what I was working with, and life started to feel like a burden too big for me to carry.
Again, just like a child, I cried for weeks until finally accepting that that was not what I wanted for my life and career and that I could not be afraid of moving forward, even if it meant a salary decrease and my fear of family and friends questioning me and criticizing my decision.
I took a deep breath — after many therapy sessions discussing how and when I would talk to my boss — and I resigned.
A while ago I was trying to write about my feelings after resigning, but for some reason, the image of my granny relearning to walk wouldn’t get out of my mind. So I just wrote about it. But all of a sudden, just like a click, it hit me. This image simply made sense.
During two or three of those four long years, I was just like my granny at the hospital, in bed, but unaware of anything else around me. By the end, I was slowly opening my eyes and trying to understand where I was. And finally, after resigning, I am relearning to walk. Slowly and wobbly. Trying to put my career back on where it should have been.
