A Career Kondo

I honestly didn’t read the book, but I am applying what I know of this joy-based decluttering phenomenon to my career. I submitted my resignation last month and today is my first day of funemployment after working at my company for four years. 18 years into the labor force, I am officially taking my first sabbatical.

I’ve long believed in the possibility of working within institutions to adjust them or at least attune them to more benevolent ends. Over the course of my career, this labor has: been an obsession, tested the boundaries of my will, crystallized abstractions into digestible sound bytes, exposed my ego and its defenses to team mates, placated my ego by putting me on big stages, taught me the difference between (and confluence of) good work and good bureaucracy, shown me how good intentions can go awry and how bad ones can be transmuted into good, coerced my inner critic to step aside for the sake of the group and ultimately afforded me the financial stability to walk away.

A friend sent me an early morning hype text barrage from the comfort of his current sabbatical, another sang me Bright Eyes’ “First Day of my Life” on FaceTime after I closed my laptop and I reveled in all the memories my team shared of how I impacted them over the years. My team was/is a chosen family of sorts—I rode the waves of countless changes and top-down directives with them because I enjoyed the work and who I got to do it with.

In my last month, I worked tirelessly leading a research project down the birth canal after 9 months of gestation. In an act of ultimate surrender, I walked out of the delivery room right before holding the baby. At the end of it all, it was the construct of corporate culture that pushed me too far and out of the room.

WIP research concepts, March

It’s an exhilirating feeling to say no when you’ve reached a limit. One can also keep saying yes, for the sake of stability and security, to the point of obliterating those limits, becoming so unfamiliar with them that they morph into carrots that promise more. More power, more purview, more credit, more moolah.

The trick about having all these things is they don’t actually hold any true value…for me anyway. I thought they did at certain moments, but it became very clear to me that power is not pursued climbing a precarious symbol of upward mobility (a ladder). True power is knowing so deeply and totally that your worth and value is not tied to your place in a system designed to make you a subservient link in a chain that leads to one person. Not the CEO, but the person all the way up and far enough out of the public who reports only to their own legacy—a gatekeeper of the past and the future.

~

If there’s one thing I’m thinking about a lot now, it’s protecting the co-sign. The complicated waltz of finding joy in something that requires bending my ethics for a percieved greater good is now on intermission. I have a harder stance on where I lay my co-sign, vigilant of my endorsements while allowing for grace in the unfolding of new philosophies and praxis. I want to engage critically and compassionately with the world around me, and not compromise that for any interpersonal or work contracts. A privilege to have the space to practice this desire, to try it on for size and see if it fits.

a furry tree in Mount Shasta

The day before I shut it all down, there was an earthquake that rocked my house during a zoom call. The blinds clapped against the window, a round of applause for the final scene. My last day fell on the new moon in Cancer, a planetary call for new paradigms, accelerating the demolition of the old order, taking up the mantle to hold space for massive transition. My labor, a double AA battery in a grid that powers half of the world’s entertainment, now separates into an infinite and free power source to serve my own joy.

I’ve known there is space for me to hold the lines in this transition, and part of that work requires a cultivation of inner resources, unlearning perception culture and recharging for *TBD*. It’s a full-time job, and the new version of me only has room for one these days.

~

There are highlights and then there are Kondos. I can confidently say there are things I’ve accomplished in my career that have felt miraculous, especially over the course of the pandemic. It’s important we take stock and pat ourselves on the freaking back! To feel like nothing can touch my joy, though, is in a whole category of its own. I am saying no to the clutter of gigs I’ve historically stacked out of scarcity, and roll-tucking projects / missions that expand my heart, counter the paradigms that wreck us and follow the pace most suited for presence and gratitude into my dresser.

I want to create work that can sustain that feeling beyond a moment or a day or a social media post’s visibility cycle. I want to innovate, continue to conjure beauty out of the shadows, spin straw into gold, create from a place of rest. I want to forgive capitalism. We know what it’s like to go so far past our limits it gets ugly.

Capital (and western thought) so often necessitate we ascend upward, but it’s clear the movement we are being called to is multi-directional in nature—so far in every possible trajectory that we find our center again.

shared by my now former manager, Angel. A true angel.

~

An excerpt from this interview with “The Simpsons” writer, John Swartzwelder I found entertaining.

For some, the runway in these institutions hasn’t run out, and for them we must hold a light. For others, destiny is calling and it’s time to coalesce.

Written as the sun rises on this new chapter,

~h