A big part of our great escape was me quitting a job I had grown to despise. I hated every day I had to go to the office and sit alone on zoom. I hated every team meeting where someone “important“ asked for our feedback and input and ignored it. It got to a point where I was outwardly rude and short tempered with people in meetings and that is not who I want to be. When I couldn’t keep the snarky comments to myself any longer, I knew it was time to leave. I hate that I had to leave a job that in theory I liked. I liked the type of work I was doing, I liked helping students get started in college, I liked my immediate coworkers, and I really liked my monthly happy hour crew. But my mental health has been in decline for a while and I knew I had to get out before too much damage was done.

So for the first time since I started babysitting in high school, I am unemployed. I babysat from high school through my mid 20s, I got a part time job in addition to babysitting as soon as I was old enough to work, and in college I worked at a preschool and usually had either another part time job or a nannying gig or both on the side. I have kept busy my whole life. Busy is how I distract myself from my thoughts. It’s how I managed my mental health until I got help six years ago and realized what I was doing.

I spent six years in therapy learning how to be instead of do. How to slow down and take it in, because Ferris was right, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it”.

So I am taking time to find my baseline. What do I need to do to function, what do I need to do to thrive and grow, and what is just a distraction. I am trying to focus on more creative things and I even made an unemployment bucket list.

So here’s to more being, less doing, and the strength to sit with my thoughts without twitching.