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My Story Part 3: How I Lost Myself and Regained Control
November 12th, 2012 by Katie Morton
Four months after being laid off, I had my first rejection from a job that I’d applied for and actually wanted. So began the anxiety about job hunting in earnest. The whole money thing was really starting to stress me out. I didn’t want to start panicking and applying for jobs willy-nilly, but I was feeling the heat, big time.
Several months later, a behemoth, big-brand-name company offered me a 6-figure salary. A mile from my house. Let that sink in: 6 figures, a mile from home. I should have been ecstatic.
My stomach churned. I didn’t want the job. I don’t mean that I felt wishy-washy about it — every fiber of my being felt revolted. The core of me screamed out, “DO NOT TAKE THIS JOB. THIS IS NOT WHERE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE.”
Sound nuts? Let me explain.
Dreams Squelched
When I was in high school, I thought I’d become an artist. I didn’t know exactly what form my profession would take, whether I would be a cartoonist or a children’s book illustrator, or what. I hadn’t thought that far. I figured I would go to college and explore my options. My parents weren’t onboard with paying astronomically-high college tuition for a kid to go off and play with crayons in her adult life. Can you blame them?
Not going to college wasn’t an option, which is just the way it was in those days in my family. I managed to squeak in some college art classes during my pursuit of a journalism degree, but I had been completely disabused of the notion of becoming a professional artist. It was okay, I thought. I liked writing, a lot. I picked up a minor in photography. I still felt creative and alive. I even kept drawing regularly as a hobby for about a year or two after college graduation.
How I Became Amnesiatic About Myself
As my “real” job as a multimedia journalist and manager for CNBC accelerated, I forgot who I was and what I actually liked to do.
My new interests became learning new technologies of the digital media world, mastering digital and business operations, mentoring employees, and growing and managing editorial teams. I made a lot of money doing it. I left CNBC to head up an editorial team for AOL. I left AOL to help launch the digital editorial operation of a fledgling Discovery-owned network, Planet Green – from which I got a coveted executive producer credit, and from which I was let go when they decided to “take the network in a new direction.”
Here I was, post-layoff, post maternity leave, a million miles from that eager high school artist, about to turn down a job offer with a salary that a lot of people would kill for. Was I completely insane?
Exploding the Definition of Insane
Big money aside, I knew what I didn’t want.
- I didn’t want to leave home early each morning on someone else’s timetable to commute to an office where I would give the best of my mind, time and energy before coming home in the evening.
- I didn’t want to pay someone else to watch my child fulltime while I missed out on the bulk of her childhood.
- I didn’t want to sit inside, under fluorescent lighting, in an office chair, for the greater part of my existence.
- I didn’t want to have little control over how I spent my time and submit to tasks that I disliked or that bored me.
- I didn’t want to sacrifice the time that my body and mind is alive to contribute to somebody else’s bottom line, rather than figuring out what’s important to me and spending time on that.
- I didn’t want to be at the whim of an inhuman corporation during the annual examination of the balance sheet.
- I didn’t want to spend most of my days on this earth working at things that won’t matter to me from my deathbed.
That’s the rub, my friend. I am not the in the mood to work my life away and then, while I’ve got one foot in the grave, wonder what I could have done to live joyously, with meaning, and how I could have touched other peoples’ lives.
What am I in the mood to do? I want to control how I spend my time, obviously. I want to go outside when the weather is nice. I want to raise my own child. I want to plan vacations because they’re fun, and not in order to escape a life of work that feels like I’m being slowly suffocated. I want to work with people of my choosing, people who light me up rather than annoy the living daylights out of me. I want to do work that aligns with my values, feels important to me, and makes me want to get out of bed in the morning.
The bottom line is that, if all goes according to plan, I have about 60 years left on this planet before I bite the dust. I want those 60 years — and I mean all of them, not just retirement — to mean something. That means finding meaningful things to do and making damn sure I’m getting out there and doing them.
Next - My Story Part 4: What I’m Giving up to Leave the Rat Race
Related Posts:
My Story Part 1: A Devastating Job Loss
My Story Part 2: The Painful Process of Trading My Corporate Identity for a Life of Freedom
My Story Part 3: How I Lost Myself and Regained Control
My Story Part 4: What I’m Giving up to Leave the Rat Race
My Story Part 5: The Birth of The Monarch Company
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