The way things always were is not the way they'll always be

New decisions deserve a new look at the data (and ourselves).

Over the past two decades, I can think of two times that I was employed full-time by someone other than myself.

The first time, I was a young mother with two small children and a third on the way. I was working full-time in an administrative job and struggling to keep everything afloat. My small children were perpetually late to their preschool classrooms and I felt like I was perpetually drowning; scrabbling to find some margin in a life that was completely dictated by the clock, the calendar, and other people’s needs and agendas. I could not imagine adding a newborn to the unmanageable mess that was my life. I sobbed frequently over my steering wheel from sheer frustration and helplessness.

Every night that summer I stayed up late, a bowl of blueberries balanced on my swelling belly, while I how to pitch my ideas to magazines. By fall, I had enough paying work lined up to feel confident reducing my office job’s hours to part-time, and within a couple of years, I left that job to freelance full-time, and never looked back.

Until six years ago, that is. A little less than a year into my separation, the precarity of my financial situation was beginning to make itself known. It turns out that even a mostly-amicable divorce can come with hefty legal bills, and after my ex moved out, paying for our family home on my own proved to be quite a burden. I also lost three major clients, one after another, the year after the separation, and didn’t have the energy to replace them.

My mojo was low-low, friends.

And while all this was happening, I fell into not one, but two jobs: a stint as a co-host on a radio station’s morning show and a 9-5 gig as a copywriter at a marketing agency.

(Yes, you read that right: one of the jobs was Radio Morning Show Co-Host, not to be confused with being a “DJ.” I did not choose the music on our “Hot Adult Contemporary” station, just made wisecracks in five-minute intervals with my co-host, Jonny. And my face was on the side of a van.)

Anyway, for a year, my days looked like this: Get up at 6:15; jump on the mic at 6:50 to do my first segment live at the kitchen table. 7:15: wake kids and shepherd them through their morning routine in spurts during songs and commercial breaks. 8 AM: Drop kids off at school and the bus stop, then head to the station for the last few segments of the show, to record ad spots with my co-host and check in. Then it was off to my “main” job at the agency, which filled the bulk of my day until I headed home to make dinner and squeeze in a few hours with my kids, perhaps surfing the Internet with a double-pour of Malbec to self-soothe after they were in bed.

Neither of my jobs were particularly difficult, and both could be really fun at times. I’m not afraid of hard work, either. But I never felt like I had a moment to call my own, something that, turns out, is more important to me than title or money.

In my morning radio job, my work was dictated by a clock. When the commercial or the song ended, I went live, whether I felt ready or not. In my agency job, my work was dictated by the calendar. If a supervisor or a client called a meeting and added me to the invitation, I showed up, whether I felt it was a good use of my time or not. When I got home, I fed my family and did the laundry and drove them around, whether I had the energy or not. My kids were still young and there were still a lot of them in the house; still so many people’s needs to meet and schedules to consider.

After racing from radio to my agency job, I’d arrive breathless and barely-on-time, with no idea what I’d find on my calendar (typically it was full of meetings put there by other people; the fact that other people could just put meetings on my calendar without asking first felt like an outrageous presumption that I never quite got over.)

And it wasn’t “just” all that demanding my time and energy. The Mom Hour podcast was quickly-growing and beginning to be profitable. The radio show often required me to be available to host or emcee evening events. And, ever the optimist, I was trying to date - which, in retrospect, was probably not a great idea.

I’m amazed, sometimes, that I managed to survive that year. I didn’t feel tired, exactly; it’s more that I was perpetually irritated and anxious over seemingly small, unrelated things, like an annoying moment in a meeting, or receiving an email that seemed passive-aggressive, or someone putting a meeting on my calendar without asking first (!!!)

I’ve since learned that this kind of emotional displacement is actually a common defense mechanism in stressful times, which makes sense. It felt as though I was standing, turning circles in place, jabbing a spear at the advancing hordes (coworkers and clients and men and, yes, kids) as my defensible free time shrunk away to nothing.

So at the first sign that the podcast might be able to support my family financially, I left the agency. A couple of months later, the radio job went, too. And since then, piece by piece, I’ve slowly reclaimed much of the autonomy I’d given away.

It may not be surprising, then, that the idea of holding another full-time job (the kind where I’m working for someone who is not myself) fills me with something akin to panic. So when a potential position that is in every way perfect for me - skillset, background, interests, career goals, and more - I hesitated, hard.

Which makes sense, of course. Taking a FT role would be a huge shift after all these years of doing my own thing. And while weighing my options, I suddenly realized that I was using the way things once were to predict how things might be, even though the situations couldn’t be more different.

My pro/con lists were far less logical than fantastical, comparing an idealized version of my current self-employment reality against a worst-case-scenario version of job-holder, based on dated, emotionally-loaded, and likely no longer accurate data.

Here are just a few of the ways my experience twenty years ago - the one that led to me launching my writing career - and my experience six years ago no longer apply to today-me life nor the opportunity in front of me: I no longer have small children in the house; I am no longer making in-the-moment career decisions from a place of severe financial lack. I now have older kids, a supportive spouse, and systems in place to help me manage a fuller workload, not to mention the emotional intelligence to help me feel my actual feelings instead of always shifting them to something else.

I also now know that when other creatives want to reserve time in their schedules for deep work, they proactively block it off on their calendars. (A lifesaving tactic!)

It’s worth remembering, friends, no matter what decision you’re making, that situations change. Our families change. We change. The opportunities themselves are new and different, even when parts of them resemble old stories we’re wary of.

We should let our lived experiences guide us, yes. But it’s only fair to us to make sure we consider everything we learned then in the context of what’s true today.

Choices about finances, work, parenting, relationships, marriage, where and how to live…all of those decisions deserve honesty about the truth we sit in today, and as deeply searching a self-inventory as we’re able to give them. (And sometimes that self-inventory can be scary and unflattering to contemplate, I’m sorry to tell you.)

I’ll share more about the opportunity and my ultimate decision soon, but right now, I just wanted to remind you of what I needed to be reminded of: the way things were is not necessarily the way they’ll always be.

Sometimes, I’m not even sure if they had to be the way they were to begin with.

Edited: This just in, friends: some big news.

I’ll be sharing more about this soon. But in the meantime, happy dance with me!