![\"leavingjob\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/162\/2015\/01\/leavingjob.jpg\")
<\/a>Last week, I left the job where I have worked for the past seven-and-three-quarter years. There\u2019s not much to say about the job itself\u2014that\u2019s the other life I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\nThere\u2019s 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\u2019s been good for my mental health, to boot. (I guess that means I should<\/em> write about it, but I\u2019m not going to do it here.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And the position where I am headed, the prospect of which just popped up unexpectedly\u2014on the road to Damascus, as it were\u2014lies before me, similarly enticing.<\/p>\n But leaving the old job has been a real blow, one I wasn\u2019t anticipating. I had some hints in advance. In the early days after I\u2019d decided to make the move, all day long in my head, I kept hearing the Beatles\u2019 song \u201cShe\u2019s Leaving Home\u201d from the Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club<\/em> album, with its opening tableau:<\/p>\n Wednesday morning at five o\u2019clock as the day begins And its haunting final refrain, \u201cShe\u2019s leaving home \/ Bye Bye.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s precious little writing about the soul and meaning of work in our lives.<\/p>\n There is, of course, the purely \u201cinstrumental\u201d kind of writing about work, the kind that documents how to maximize strengths and navigate interpersonal communication dilemmas\u2014the whole logorrhea of Who Moved My Cheese?<\/em> kind of management literature.<\/p>\n There\u2019s 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\u2019t Drive You Crazy if You Don\u2019t Give Them the Keys\u2014<\/em> although I see now that the book was about all annoying people, not just the ones you work with. (I was, perhaps, projecting.)<\/p>\n And then there is that whole realm of Dilbert<\/em>-style joshing\u2014my brother used to have a coffee cup that bore the inscription: \u201cIt\u2019s hard to soar like eagles when you work with turkeys.\u201d<\/p>\n To say nothing of the slightly-true-but-also-slightly-paranoid writing in places as varied as The Utne Reader<\/em> and First Things<\/em> about The Man\u2019s 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\u2019s world domination. (Funny how the leftists and the conservatives converge on some key points.)<\/p>\n But I haven\u2019t 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, \u201cI think I\u2019ve figured out that midlife is like adolescence all over again.\u201d<\/p>\n 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: \u201cThat\u2019s the Way,\u201d by Led Zeppelin, \u201cBig Black Car\u201d by Big Star, \u201cFearless\u201d by Pink Floyd.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n And there\u2019s nothing in the literature, either, about the myriad of sensations I suddenly began to know that I would miss\u2014nothing sexual, per se, but an eros of work, nonetheless:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s\/everybody\u2019s) on a conference room table.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s an analogy: It occurred to me a few years back that I could never purely partake of my Southern identity because I\u2019d 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\u2019t \u201creally\u201d been either.<\/p>\n It is Monday now, and I am in my nightgown at eleven o\u2019clock 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\u2019s hallways\u2014I 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.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, Caroline Langston<\/strong><\/a> 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\u2019s \u201cAll Things Considered.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nSilently closing her bedroom door
\nLeaving the note that she hoped would say more
\nShe goes downstairs to the kitchen clutching her handkerchief
\nQuietly turning the backdoor key
\nStepping outside she is free<\/em><\/p>\n