Breaking Up with My Job

Last week, I left the job where I have worked for the past seven-and-three-quarter years. There’s not much to say about the job itself—that’s the other life I don’t write about in this forum, the one where I live under another name entirely, although in this day of the online permanent record, you can connect all the dots in a minimum of keystrokes on Google.

There’s also little to say because it was a very good job, the kind of rare position that is always being written about in our papers of record for its flexibility and humane part-time hours, along with its intellectual challenge. Despite my commitments to domesticity, volunteerism and full-on mothering, it never made sense not to work, and it’s been good for my mental health, to boot. (I guess that means I should write about it, but I’m not going to do it here.)

And the position where I am headed, the prospect of which just popped up unexpectedly—on the road to Damascus, as it were—lies before me, similarly enticing.

But leaving the old job has been a real blow, one I wasn’t anticipating. I had some hints in advance. In the early days after I’d decided to make the move, all day long in my head, I kept hearing the Beatles’ song “She’s Leaving Home” from the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club album, with its opening tableau:

Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins
Silently closing her bedroom door
Leaving the note that she hoped would say more
She goes downstairs to the kitchen clutching her handkerchief
Quietly turning the backdoor key
Stepping outside she is free

And its haunting final refrain, “She’s leaving home / Bye Bye.”

So clearly there was something else going on. And it struck me that despite all the hype expended in the media on romantic and parenting relationships, there’s precious little writing about the soul and meaning of work in our lives.

There is, of course, the purely “instrumental” kind of writing about work, the kind that documents how to maximize strengths and navigate interpersonal communication dilemmas—the whole logorrhea of Who Moved My Cheese? kind of management literature.

There’s an extension of this, as well, into Christian publishing realms, too: In the Christian book rack at my local CVS, I saw a book titled People Can’t Drive You Crazy if You Don’t Give Them the Keys— although I see now that the book was about all annoying people, not just the ones you work with. (I was, perhaps, projecting.)

And then there is that whole realm of Dilbert-style joshing—my brother used to have a coffee cup that bore the inscription: “It’s hard to soar like eagles when you work with turkeys.”

To say nothing of the slightly-true-but-also-slightly-paranoid writing in places as varied as The Utne Reader and First Things about The Man’s plot to alienate affection for home and community by making people content as sixty-hour-a-work-week drones in the cogs of the one percent’s world domination. (Funny how the leftists and the conservatives converge on some key points.)

But I haven’t read anything to account for the fact that I went into the office on the first day of my last week there, and laid my head down on my desk and bawled. From its beginning, the whole week felt emotionally charged. I felt at the same time electric and rather desperate: I emailed my brother John and said, “I think I’ve figured out that midlife is like adolescence all over again.”

For that is what I felt like, both high and blue as I sat at my desk writing final reports and updating electronic files, listening to a parade of songs a high school girl (at least of my era) might listen to after a breakup: “That’s the Way,” by Led Zeppelin, “Big Black Car” by Big Star, “Fearless” by Pink Floyd.

It could have been an afternoon in boarding school in 1985, with me running across the quadrangle and up the stairs to my dorm room, flinging myself across my tight and tidy bed and crying into the pillows.

And there’s nothing in the literature, either, about the myriad of sensations I suddenly began to know that I would miss—nothing sexual, per se, but an eros of work, nonetheless:

The blast of cool air that came through the door when my office mate came back upstairs from her periodic smoke breaks. The earnest energy that a staff of twenty-somethings brought to the gray-walled rooms, and the comfort I had come to feel in realizing that now, truly, I was one of the elders. The angle of a colleague’s sharp cheekbone, far more interesting to me in a meeting than the subject at hand; the warm aura of an arm next to mine (anybody’s/everybody’s) on a conference room table.

Here’s an analogy: It occurred to me a few years back that I could never purely partake of my Southern identity because I’d gone away to boarding school when I was so young, and that the Emersonian New England institution was a parent to me, as well. And apparently, we are parents and children at our jobs, too. Friends and lovers also, even if we haven’t “really” been either.

It is Monday now, and I am in my nightgown at eleven o’clock in the morning with a few days that are unstructured before I begin my new job. But in my mind, I can feel the nap of the carpet along the office’s hallways—I often went furtively barefoot, late in the day. And I can hear the roar of the HVAC blasting its warm air, on this cold, cold day, as it circulates on and off.

A native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, Caroline Langston is a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church. She is a widely published writer and essayist, a winner of the Pushcart Prize, and a commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

Photo by Omar Gurnah, used under a Creative Commons license.