A lot of things happen when you quit your job.
Phase One: You WHAT?!
Let's say you have an awesome job. You love what you do, you love the people you work with, you love the company you work for and the perks are great. Heaven! Except as time goes on, you start to feel less and less engaged. You've been doing the same job, in the same place, for eight years now. The opportunities for advancement aren't really grabbing you, for various reasons, and you've been waiting for something more challenging to come along for over a year now.
This is how it happened to me, and I decided to quit my job. Let me be clear: NOTHING happened that was out of the ordinary. I just decided that I'd had more than enough of retail management, and that was that. The day I decided, I remember thinking "I feel like this is a completely normal decision now, but I'm probably going to wake up screaming in the middle of the night." While it wasn't exactly like that (I only scream for food), I had this "I did WHAT?!" moment the next day after everything had processed.
Phase Two: Realizing Your Own Mortality
Somewhere inside my head is a third-grader who dictates everything I eat, what time I go to bed and seems to get hold of my wallet now and again. Also somewhere inside my head is a geriatric senior citizen, who makes her presence known mostly in the mornings and whenever I try to get out of a comfortable chair. Occasionally, the senior citizen speaks.
She had a lot to say about me quitting my job.
The thing is, after eight years, you get kind of used to things like medical benefits and financial security. Once those things are no longer a factor in your big-picture planning, you become convinced that you'll suddenly need emergency dental surgery because you're going to trip and fall and hit your open, grinning mouth and all your teeth will fly out and get smashed into the pavement. THIS COULD HAPPEN.
The best I could do in this phase was get my eczema cream prescrip refilled, buy a buttload of my disposable contacts and make an appointment with my dentist during my last week at work.
Phase Three: You Can't Do Anything Else
This was a rough one. If you, like me, had been in the same industry essentially since you started working, and you're suddenly sick of it, you learn, real fast, why you should have stayed in college and finished your degree. Going back to school is a romantic idea best left to people in their twenties. At 37, even without kids depending on you, this isn't a possibility.
The whole reason I started working in retail in the first place was because I hated school. I did one year of college and then decided to fuck off. I needed to find a job, so I went to the mall. This was back in the days where you had to arm yourself with a million paper copies of your resume (at this point in my life, I'd had three jobs: babysitting, which I slyly hid under the far more professional-sounding "Private Child Care", Telemarketing and Payroll Clerk) and just go store to store, shaking hands with the manager and hoping they didn't notice your anxiety-sweats. Thank god the internet came along. Eventually, someone took pity on me and hired me to sell clothes, and through what I'm convinced was sheer dumb luck, I found myself having fallen into the role of Assistant Manager within my first year in retail.
From there, despite several attempts to return to school, I was pulled into the maelstrom of Retail Management as Your Career. I kept thinking of myself as a kid with a full-time job until one day I realized I was an adult with a career. What made this difficult for me was that I realized this just as I quit my job, and now I was an Adult With No Career.
Every other time in my life that I wasn't happy with my job, I just found a new one. Sometimes it was before I had quit my current job, sometimes it was after, but each time, I wasn't changing careers, so it was no big deal to find another retail management gig. Now I find myself with tons of customer service and people-management skills, and not much else. What do you do when you decide to change careers?
... if you know the answer, text a bitch.
Phase Four: Telling People
I learned this the hard way - people expect to be told when major things in your life are happening. I did not see that coming at all, which is one of the many reasons that I sometimes think I must be sociopath. YOUR FRIENDS EXPECT YOU TO TELL THEM THINGS. Wait, I have friends?
My family knew I quit, because I told them the day it happened. I let my staff know during a meeting at work. Once my staff knew, I started telling my coworkers, or at least the ones I thought would care. What I learned is that there are way more people who gave a shit than I had anticipated, and every single one of them was curious as to why I was being so mysterious.
I wasn't being mysterious (not intentionally, anyway). I just didn't think anyone would care that much, mostly because I assume that people don't care about things that don't directly affect them. In case you're thinking the same thing, YOU ARE WRONG. Lots of people care, lots of people are curious and lots of people like to be involved in supporting you and wishing you well as you leave a company you've been part of for nearly a decade. This gives me the warm fuzzies, and also confronts me with a harsh truth I always suspected: The reason I don't have a lot of friends isn't that people don't like me, it's that I don't know how friendship works.
So you need to tell people, and more people than you'd think if you're an awkward bastard like me.
Phase Five: Acceptance
So there you are, no career. If you're a boss bitch, you accept it and go live your life.
I gleefully accept the fact that I quit. I wasn't happy and that was that. I have never doubted my decision. I'm not sure where I'm going, but I know that my apartment is going to get organized all to hell while I figure it out. I'm going to enjoy the freedom that comes with NOT working in a mall downtown. I'm going to enjoy not walking face-first into a wall of hobo-stank every time I get off the subway. I'm going to relax and eat my lunch in peace without some asshole street harassing me because I have tits. I'm going to get 8 hours of sleep every night. I'm going to get a library card.
I might be broke as fuck, but I'm happy.
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