Enough.

Well, after a bit of soul-searching, I've decided to leave my job.

It started with the NYC teaching deal... it got me thinking again about what I want to do with myself, really, long-term. I mean, in 3 and a half years since college, I have worked as a teacher, individual tutor, part-time gardener, plant sale manager, overseas documentarian, semi-janitor, editorial staff, teaching program administrator, development coordinator for a non-profit, in-home elder care, USPS postmaster relief, municipal auditor, and now, service coordinator for the mentally ill. What does this add up to? I thought about it, long and hard. Finally, I settled on a conclusion I could stand by:

I don't know.

However, I let that drop and thought about what I'd like to be doing for a living.  I thought of three things, potentially.  Creative writing, teaching history at pretty much any level, and editorial work.  The first is a pipe dream -- almost nobody makes a living doing that; you do something else and write on the side. Meanwhile, I made it far enough into the NYCTF program that it was clear I would not be teaching history, and that whatever M.Ed. I earned would be in whatever other area they assigned me to spend 2 years teaching -- which translates into a lot of work and stress for the rest of my time in NYC for a degree at the end that will not essentially help me do what I want to.  Yikes.  So after talking it over a lot with kaph, and my parents (who spent a while in this city when they were simultaneously teaching and earning graduate degrees, and didn't recommend it), I decided not to pursue the fellowship farther.

So at the end of all this thinking, I didn't find myself in a bright, new, enlightened place regarding what I will do soon, and for the rest of my life.  What I was left with, was a strong feeling that I could be doing something I simply had better skills for than what I'm doing now.  I don't feel negatively, at heart, about the job: my co-workers are nice, and I do basically like helping people, even deeply troubled and often exasperating people.  No prob.  But the management here does not provide me with the practical tools, or emotional support, to really succeed here; and then you have to add in that my job has turned out to be more constant crisis management, and not much of helping people develop basic life skills.  And when I tried to picture myself staying at it for as long as ejiaw's heroic stint, what I saw resembled badly burnt meatloaf.  I think it was my soul I saw....

And that was the wake-up call.  Soon I thought of doing something else, maybe something that wasn't such a leap into the unknown.  Something I felt equipped to do by my previous experience, instead of having to learn a whole new bureaucracy and skill sets.  And I thought, yes, that's what I'd like to try doing right now.

So, I submitted my resignation last Friday.  In two weeks, I'll be back where I was last fall -- writing more, and looking for work, with all the inherent stresses thereof.  But they'll be different stresses than I've got right now, and I feel good about it.  I've learned a lot here, practically and about myself, and now I'm glad to be leaving.  And from that angle, it's really not so bad at all.

And the fun part is -- who knows what I'll find to do next?  It's really rather exciting! 

Anyone want to hazard a guess?