Upon Quitting the Day Job
Two days ago I handed a type-written letter to my boss saying that my last day of work would take place at the end of the month. I had had no plans to do this even a day before—just some roaming thoughts of what it would be like to leave my job, move closer to the city, and to devote more time to my writing; but when I woke that morning I had a clear vision of it, the path that I might take, as if I’d stumbled upon it in the dark. I had no way of knowing that the path wouldn’t suddenly disappear, or that my attention wouldn’t soon wander to other possibilities, which might prove more enticing. And so, when I got to work that morning, I knew that I needed to make a decision. I stepped onto the path.
I have never truly declared writing to be the thing that I am doing—that is, I have been writing since I was a child, and it is often the thing that animates my day; I write nearly every day, either after or before going to a day job; and I have spent entire days writing, at times when I happened to find myself in between two obligations. And yet I have never declared, “now I will do nothing but write”—never made it my sole occupation, my service to the world, my reason for being.
I was taken off-guard by how special this felt. I thought that I had become a writer long ago, that I had sufficiently established my identity to the people around me, and that all there was left for me to do was do the thing itself, to keep on writing. If on a given day I’d come home after work and manage to simply get a few words onto the page, then I thought that I was doing all I could. The idea of taking a few months off from wage-making in order to really hash something out had always been a possibility, but it felt more like a fantasy, like dreaming of all the places one could (someday) go for vacation; I didn’t think of it as something I might need to do—not only for the sake of having more time, but for the sake of better writing.
It feels as though a certain flood-gate—one that has been inside me for a very long time, and so has created a landscape that I have grown used to and came to believe necessary—has unceremoniously been opened, and the characters in my head have suddenly found themselves with more land than they ever thought possible. I’m not even sure that they have any idea of what to do with it. They had accepted their lives as they were. Now there is the sense of possibility: a new future, full of things they never dreamed of having any right to, and in which they might finally have a stake.