Truth is…the pandemic was, to some degree, merely a trigger of an eventual trend which I personally believe would have materialized at some future point anyway. We’ve all seen it or heard about it in 2022: many of the people forced to work at home during the time of the pandemic came out the other end of that experience rethinking their need for returning to an office or other physical place of work. In the case of those in the service or retail industry who were squeezed out of their jobs due to the pandemic-inflicted restrictions (this is just my observation, I have no stats here), they simply didn’t go back to these jobs. Maybe because they found something better to do. Or maybe they found a way to make their own money.
I wonder if that’s what happened to that pizzeria.
Every place I’ve ever been employed at during my four and a half decades of working for someone else has always included a chorus of employees who threaten to quit for any number of unhappy reasons. Yet at no other point until these past two years have I heard so many co-workers changing up their lyrics to express desires for doing their own thing as their primary source of income.
Negotiating my way along that crowded sidewalk, I heeded for the first time a subconscious alarm that, so often in the past, kept getting snooze bar’d by my own ‘logical’ and ‘practical’ conscious mind. The alarm said: “Work for yourself. Live for yourself.” Over the decades, I harbored many reasons why I didn’t just ditch my life of working for other people and dive headfirst into working for myself as a writer…as a musician…as a freelance software code writer…as anything where the only person I had to answer to was me. One of these days, I might write an essay on the often confused and misunderstood fine line between ‘reasons’ and ‘excuses,’ but for now just know that, starting during that beach trip, I spent the remainder of 2021 and the entire first half of 2022 putting the pieces together for my eventual ascension into the liberating and/or terrifying life of the self-employed.
At exactly the halfway point of 2022, I announced my resignation to my employer, and have been working on all things related to my desires to write for a living ever since.
I performed the deed so seamlessly (for the most part) that many people who know me don’t even realize I’m no longer in the work force. Allow me to be more specific…the ‘working for someone else’ work force. I’ve exited from other jobs in the past. Some of those resignations were because I had a better opportunity elsewhere. Some were executed to preserve my sanity and peace of mind. All of those resignations translated into better things for me…except that they put me right back under the employment of someone else. With that in mind, you can see why my 2022 resignation was my best exit ever.
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