I quit my job

(Some of you know this, some of you don't! So this is my way of announcing to all of you.)

It's been a month now since I left my tech job without having my next job lined up. Many people, including the internet, advised against it, while others called it brave (polite euphemism for "bad idea"). But honestly, all I've felt since I left has been peace and relief.

(Warning: Long introspective post ahead. To all my friends who actually read my ramblings, I applaud you.)

I was always the smart, straight-A student in school. I gravitated toward STEM, because that's what my parents did, and that's what smart kids do. I aced math and physics! I got into MIT! I loved space, and I was laser-focused on becoming an engineer and working on the next Mars rover. I studied aerospace engineering and aced that too (eh, mostly). Then I started my shiny new engineering job the week after graduation. My bosses and coworkers loved me, and I got big raises every year. I was on the fast track to success.

Things started going bad over a year ago, after two years at my job. But this also lined up with a lot of external events. I got mono, which gave me really bad fatigue that lasted a couple months and made working hard. I took a lot of sick time, got kind of in trouble for taking too much sick time, then went on partial disability for a while. I was just getting better, and then the pandemic hit and sent us all home for remote work.

Working from home was bad. I couldn't feel motivated at home. Our office was technically open, since we were "essential", but it was mostly deserted and a depressing place to be. Also, I was the only person on my project, and shouldering that all by myself was even more isolating. My motivation was tanked and I couldn't seem to fix it.

I did some therapy and had some talks with my boss before I figured out that it was specifically the working alone that was getting to me. I got added to a second project with more people on it. That was okay for a while, but then that project got too big and split into smaller projects. I got chosen as the lead for the sub-project, but since we were short on staff, I was on my own again. (Yes, lead of a party of 1. Wow.)

Of course, it was 2020, and things sucked for everyone. I hung in there even though my motivation was still destroyed and my performance was slowly and steadily declining.

Summer came, along with the huge surge in the Black Lives Matter movement. The news was overwhelming. My company acted like nothing unusual was happening. Someone posted a news article in the work chat and got shut down for being political in the workplace. (We're a government contractor. The article was about an executive order Trump signed banning diversity training in government contractor workplaces.)

The 2020 election election was crazy as well, and was a pretty big hit to my faith in humanity and our nation. And that's kind of important when you work in defense.

The new year came, and I stumbled across the finish line. To my surprise, I got a huge raise at my annual review, partly because of my new leadership roles (by then, more people had been added to both my projects). 

Usually the praise I get at my performance reviews buoys my mood and motivation for at least a couple days. They say that kids who grew up high-achieving in school tend to rely a lot on extrinsic motivation like that. But the money and praise only boosted me for about half a day before I was back in the pits of zero motivation and guilt about my lack of motivation.

My work performance was getting so bad that I would panic every night over what I hadn't done that day. I cried a lot. I sat at my desk staring blankly at my screen for hours every day. Since I was still bearing the majority of the weight on one of my projects, my boss started to notice my lack of contribution. He's usually pretty lax with deadlines, but he started to firm up on me. My other project also had a high pressure deadline coming up. But despite having eyes on me and deadlines to hit, and staying up late every single night, I didn't feel an ounce of adrenaline come to help me get to work. I missed both deadlines.

Deadlines are another extrinsic motivator that usually get me going. I was a huge procrastinator in high school and college, and many times only the threat of a looming deadline would kick me into gear. I would literally stay up until 4 am for that rush of last-minute adrenaline just so I could get my work done. But now it wasn't happening at all.

While trying to motivate myself with threats, I realized even the threat of losing my job couldn't faze me enough to do an ounce of work. That was a red flag. This might seem like an extreme comparison, but the lack of adrenaline felt the same way it did when I was dealing with major depression back in school. Just like I no longer felt anything when considering the possibility of death back when I was suicidal, I no longer cared if I would lose my job. (By the way, I don't think I was actually close to getting fired. People still loved me. But I knew the work I was doing was subpar now.) And just like I used to have constant recurring and invasive fantasies about dying, now I would daydream about quitting. I was at the "suicidal ideation" phase of wanting to leave my job, but not yet the "suicidal intention" phase.

Another red flag, which Isaac frequently brought up to me, was that I was being miserable about work for x months in a row. This had hit over a year now.

I basically had a breakdown one day and decided to leave one of my projects. I thought maybe I was getting stressed out balancing two things and having to context switch between them. I was optimistic things would get better after the change.

It didn't. I still had zero motivation. A few more days of that, and I finally hit the cracking point.

I still hadn't quite figured out what was wrong, but I had a sudden burning conviction that things weren't right and I couldn't endure it anymore. One thing that I had been holding on to all this time was that my problems might all be pandemic-related, and that by the time it was all over things would go back to normal. But the thought of holding on a couple more weeks, yet alone several months, had become completely unbearable.

Then we had an all-hands meeting where our CEO basically took a stance on the ethics of working in defense. I'll just say, I did not agree with that stance. 

People say you shouldn't leave your job until you have another one lined up. A lot of people, when I told them I was thinking about quitting my job, also asked me to think about whether I was running away from something, or toward something. Normally I would say that's a good question. But when you're in a burning house, you don't wait until you've bought a new one to get out. You just get out.

I did think about it though. One question was if maybe I was just not dealing with stress very well, which would be a problem that would follow me no matter where I went. I even questioned if I had ADD -- that's how shattered my focus and executive functions were at work. 

What convinced me that this wasn't the case were my hobbies. I had plenty of energy to garden and refinish furniture, even when things got hard. I was able to power through low energy days, make tough decisions, draw up plans and follow through on them. Doing my hobbies, I felt completely alive. At work, I felt completely dead. The difference was that at work all I had was extrinsic motivation, and that alone wasn't enough for me anymore. When I did things I actually liked, I had plenty of intrinsic motivation to keep me going.

Another thing I noticed was that although I was completely demotivated at work, one thing I was still good at, and still had the energy to do, was my leadership duties. I killed it at meetings and presentations. I was great at scheduling and tasking. When it came down to the tasks themselves though, I couldn't do it. My coworkers usually complain about meetings and organizational work that prevent them from coding and doing their focus work, but I actually felt the opposite. I welcomed meetings, powerpoints, and status reports. But then I couldn't bear to write a single line of code.

Then it hit me -- do I even like engineering?

I went into engineering because I could. People said I was smart enough to do it, and it paid well, and was highly respected as a a cool and smart thing to do. 

Also, engineering was very aligned with my personality in high school and early college. (Sorry in advance if you think personality types are bogus.) I was an ISTP ("The Mechanic"): logical, fiercely independent, analytical, aloof. Around halfway through college, I hit an extreme depressive episode, and came out the other end an INFP ("The Idealist"): caring, emotional, perceptive, idealistic. The Sensing and Thinking parts of my personality completely flipped over to iNtuition and Feeling. 

I guess trauma changed my personality. I was at such a low point, and so depressed, and the only way I survived was by changing my mindset. I threw myself into a community at school, and later met Isaac and started dating him. I used to be a prestige chaser -- I wanted to go to MIT, I wanted to look cool, I wanted to work for NASA. Instead I became a simple person with simple wants: to have close friends, to have stability, to enjoy myself. These were the things that lifted me out of the pits of depression, not being cool and smart.

Here's some memes to give you a better sense of my before-and-after personality:

Before:

After:

So yeah. Less of a stereotypical engineer, and more of a... something else. From raw fish to noodle soup.

I told my friend this, and he asked: If I had experienced such a dramatic shift, what was my foundation? What had stayed the same?

The answer was my creative streak. You could argue that engineering solutions to problems is creative, but the things that had always interested me were things like art and design. Something that made you feel something. 

This conclusion was a big a-ha moment for me. I'd been journalling about my job satisfaction for a while now. I opened up my notebook to a mind map of ways I could see my career going. And I highlighted everything that was creative, as things that I had a high likelihood of enjoying. I also highlighted anything that was "technical", as things that I had a high likelihood of being good at due to my current skill set. (Technical work also has the added bonus that it probably pays more.)

(Side note: I love restoring and refinishing furniture, but I don't think it's scalable enough for me to make a full-time living off it. Also, it's been shown that when your hobby becomes your job, you actually enjoy it less. So I want to keep it as a fun hobby that sometimes makes money, but isn't my lifeline.)

By now, I've also come to the conclusion that I love helping people. I think that's why I liked project management -- I made customers feel heard and taken care of, and engineers feel respected and understood. I built common understandings. And then I made sure shit got done. 

Anyway, I'm still thinking about all this, and exploring what kind of jobs are out there, and what I actually like doing. Maybe I'll make another post about that later when things are more figured out. I've got job applications and interviews underway, but I'm not rushing myself or settling for any job that will take me. I have savings for up to a year, and the luxury of being picky. 

What else am I doing now? Having a great time! It's been absolutely amazing shedding all my work stress. I was worried I'd get bored or depressed after a couple weeks of not having any structured things to do, but my life has felt full to the brim. I've spent a lot of time on furniture, been able to visit family and friends for longer periods of time, and enjoyed the great spring weather. And most importantly, I don't feel miserable anymore.

My desk right now: blogging about my thoughts, notebook open while I teach myself Elm, and surrounded by thriving plants. Also a purring cat off-screen :)