Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
As in ... breaking up with your job!
“Are you taking early retirement?” she asked. I almost wept. It was Saturday. I was preparing for Sunday. By now, most people were wondering how many times I was going to leave my job. I had talked about it for so long. I had written up every inch of the decision-making process. But, it was almost the end of July and after working out an unpaid notice period and running it concurrently alongside the last three months of a career break, I was finally exiting stage left. Yes, after repeatedly waving goodbye and promising to leave, I was eventually driving off into the sunset. My leaving date happened to coincide with my birthday. I couldn’t decide if this made it even more symbolic or it was just too much to cope with in one day.
I had gone for Cerulean Sea. It was a vibrant azure-blue, the colour of tropical oceans and summer skies. I chose it because I wanted to feel bright, youthful, alive and ready for new challenges. It was being skilfully applied to my nails by a twenty-one-year-old beautician. “Are you doing anything interesting this weekend?” she’d asked, making polite conversation and wondering what on earth someone the age of her mother could possibly be doing that was interesting. “I’m heading out to celebrate leaving my job,” I replied. Her reaction was sobering. In reality, I was old. I hadn’t that many years left until my public sector pension kicked in, possibly a decade and a half. Maybe it was too late to re-invent myself.
None of the decision-making, the emotional rollercoaster, the realisation that my job didn’t bring me flowers anymore1, the nine months of deliberating over whether I should stay or go2, the deconditioning from the idols that had defined me3, had actually equipped me for the brutal realities of leaving. One evening, just before the nights started to draw in again, after around 1.5 glasses of something pink and fizzy, I commiserated at length with a man who had just made a long speech at his ‘retirement do’. He was a ‘regrettable leaver’, his attrition mourned by his organisation. I wasn’t sure if anyone cared that much about me. I’d mainly been required to hand over my intellectual property rights. We questioned our value to the world. We specifically bonded over the loss of our email addresses. “It contains my whole life,” he said. Mine was intricately organised into folders and sub-folders. I’d spent twenty years curating it. I could never find anything in it without instigating a deep dive. With thirty days to go, an automated email was triggered. My IT user account access would be disabled on my leaving date. I would be evicted. There was no cooling-off period.
I was aware of all the clichés, “you can’t meet your future, if you can’t leave your past”, “feel the fear and do it anyway”, “try again, fail again, fail better”. I had to keep moving forward, not back. I’d completed all the formalities - returned my staff card, handed over my ancient laptop. I’d even filled in the exit questionnaire. I’d come to terms with the fact that my large organisation had primarily provided a safe holding environment. It had enabled me to believe that I mattered. It had given me a viable identity, an opportunity to belong effortlessly to something bigger than myself. I could have gone to sleep there for a few years and still received the same salary. But I wanted more and I was determined to deal with those existential anxieties - Who am I? Where am I going? Do I matter? I’d processed most of the losses - title, status, income, validation, colleagues. Yet, it was the loss of an email address that almost brought me to my knees. I panicked. Most of July was spent trying to figure out how to do a back-up, how to preserve the life that was in there. Now, even though I have been deleted from all systems, I am somewhat at peace as I have a .olm file I may never open.
I tried not to dwell on the automation of the leaving process, the lack of any personalised thank-you, my line manager’s deafening silence. I wanted to shout, “you’re only a number” from the rooftops to anyone who was still sacrificing their health, their relationships, their happiness and their sanity to love a job that would never love them back. I was trying not to become bitter. “They’ve forgotten me already,” I said to my husband when I sent an email to thirty-eight people to let them know I was leaving and received four replies. “But sure, you didn’t want any fuss,” he said, “you hate all that stuff”. And he was right, I was being dramatic, most were on their summer holidays and my preference had always been to slip off quietly, to disappear under cover of darkness - no card, no farewell party, no event where there was even the slightest risk that no one would turn up. But with nothing to officially mark the occasion, it was all becoming a bit of an anti-climax.
“We’ll have our own leaving do, just the two of us,” I decided. I reckoned the other consistent presence in my life for the last twenty years would definitely turn up. His love was not based on any KPIs. I put on a blue dress to match my blue nails. “Can you take a photo of me for Twitter?” I said. “One that makes me look like a writer?”. We experimented with angles, lighting, poses, gazes into the distance. The rejections piled up - the bloated ones, the scary ones, the ones where you could see every crease in my face. In the end, I shared one I could cope with. I look unintentionally smug. There is a stain on the chair beside me. I am gripping a martini.
And then, it was the morning after the night before. On Monday 1 August, I was another year older. I was also unemployed. A notification popped up on my phone. I needed to enter a password. I had been signed out. For once, my employer had kept to their word. On Tuesday, when my P45 arrived, I searched the envelope for a compliment slip, a handwritten note. There was nothing else. But, at least, my nails still looked good. “Where is the Cerulean Sea?” I wondered. I googled to check. It didn’t exist, just like me. Someone had written a novel about it. It was about discoveries in unexpected places. I read the closing lines. They seemed appropriate.
“Sometimes, …. in a house in a cerulean sea, you were able to choose the life you wanted. And if you were of the lucky sort, sometimes that life chose you back”4.
And time will tell if that life will choose me back too!