I’m not working at Adobe anymore.
In fact, I’m 100% unemployed for the first time in 14 years!
The process of my job at Adobe ending was a months-long rollercoaster, and while I was gutted and freaked out at first, now I just feel unburdened.
Something felt off for me at work for years, even before I worked at Adobe. Working there was supposed to be the fix, the cure to my confidence issues. This was a dream company, whose products I had admired for years. Everything I had worked for led me to this! But my “new job” nerves never fully eased. Still, I was determined to stick it out. This had to work—and if there’s one thing I can do, it’s endure.
Pushing through was successful for the first few years. I had plenty of beliefs to interrogate along the way. What I learned: some of my problems at work were growing pains, a necessary leveling up into adulthood and taking responsibility for my own values and relationship with work. I worked on mindset and boundaries. I solved what I could with therapy, reading, career coaching and asking for help at work. My ego died so many times! Some of my problems were due to having a new baby and bad sleep for a year… an effect I discounted until I started getting sleep again (what the fuck was I thinking! Survival mode). And some of my problems were due to systemic issues (i.e. capitalism, burnout culture, lack of support and bias against working moms) that I couldn’t do anything about. I’m still upset about those.
In the last couple years, while things at work still didn’t feel resolved, I sensed I was giving my job too much power to set the tone for my emotional wellbeing. Most times I was frustrated or stressed, inside our outside of work, I traced it back to my job. It was a convenient target. Like my children, it sucked up a lot of time and energy, but unlike my angel babies, I was allowed to talk shit about it.
I asked dozens of friends and coworkers about work—why does it still feel so hard? Is it always going to be this way? Am I just not cut out for this? No one really had an answer, although a few books came close. At least, they helped draw the lines around the problems: me, the job, the culture, parenting in the United States, and economic policy. The correct answer is, unfortunately, all of the above. So what do we now, operating with these constraints?
I wish I could say I drew a bold new vision for my work-life, blue sky thinking, forming a plan and executing The Next Big Thing. But no. I stayed put. It was an objectively good job. I was performing well. I had built good relationships and so much domain expertise. I was making a lot of fucking money, and most of all I was way too chicken to find out what else was out there.
After all my mental gymnastics, the will-she or won’t-she, “my job is the source of all my woes” yet refusing to consider other options, my job ended anyway! And I don’t know what I’m doing next. People have been hammering home that the tech job market is the worst it’s ever been. I believe them! I hope all my soul-searching the last few years is going to propel me somewhere where I feel like I belong and get to work on interesting problems—isn’t that what we all want?
But one thing I’ve realized from not working the last couple months—I had an extremely simple false dichotomy in my head.
If I have a job, I’ll be ok.
If I don’t, I won’t be ok.
But I can admit now that reality is messier. I had a job, and sometimes I was ok; sometimes I wasn’t. The important thing is that now I have proof that when I don’t have a job, I am also, periodically ok, and not ok. Leaving my job took the edge off of some of my stress, but every other anxiety or resentment I had is still here. Diabolical.
In short, instead of trying to find meaning or equilibrium in corporate America, now I have to find the meaning of life. Are you fucking kidding me?
Still, I feel so much gratitude. I’m proud of the woman who pushed through, even if that wasn’t necessarily the thing that honored my mental health. And I’m excited to get to know the next version of me. I’m grateful for a soft landing and that money is not an urgent concern, for now. I feel like I can take the good parts of working at Adobe with me (the relationships, professional experience, 9 more months of free Creative Cloud access, and this black hoodie) and leave the hard parts behind. I extracted what I could from the company….which is ironic given that capitalism is all about extracting value from the workers. I really thought I was over-identifying with my job and that moving on would take away a piece of me. But now it’s so easy to leave it in the rearview mirror. It was something I did, not the sum total of who I am. I always knew that, in my head, but now I know it in my bones.
I left my job a few months after my maternity leave ended. Some days I really really miss it and some days I can't imagine ever going back to a job where someone else is my boss. Some days I feel really insecure about not having a job and the growing gap in my resume and the skills I'm not using or exercising and industry changes I'm not learning about. Other days I'm thankful that I have the ability to take this time off and really think about what I want to do when I start working again and where I want to do it.
I hope you find your way down the path you want to be on.
I think a lot of us are burnt out right now and we’re slaves to the job that has too much power over our lives to set the tones. I’m glad sometimes you’re ok, sometimes you’re not ok. You’re doing great.