True Confessions: I Booty Called My Ex-Career

Losing your job can break your heart. I know this because many moons ago I was a college professor. No, really.

I’ve talked before about It was not only a job I loved, but it was my "dream job " that I had worked incredibly hard to get. While I've talked about what steps I took to find a new job to love, we need to talk about how broken hearted and freaked out I was!

I was a Humanities Professor at several fantastic colleges here in the Bay Area. As I'm sure you know, education/academia is not a cash cow but I loooooved my job. Like REALLY loved it, so I scrimped, saved, worked weird little jobs in the cracks between classes to make ends meet but it all finally came to a head when my options were a) move across the country for a tenure track position and be struggling slightly less financially (only now in a place far from home) OR b) find a new career.

How did I feel about my options? Like I didn’t really have any.

I was devastated.

It was like a long-term, 'this is it forever'?romantic relationship ending! It took me months of soul searching and not a few tears to get to a place where I could even acknowledge that there really were other doors. Wide open doors.

I held on to one or two night classes and took several jobs that I knew I would hate - which I looked at as a good thing because I was still trying to make teaching work and any other job would “just” be a day job that I could leave when I found a way to make teaching work.

IT WAS LIKE BOOTY CALLING MY EX-CAREER

After 2 (yes TWO!) years of drunkenly texting my ex-career, I finally had the talk with myself that someone always has to have with you after a breakup. The “IT’S OVER MOVE ON” talk. The hard truth that your bestie gives you.

But unlike a ‘true’ breakup, nobody was telling me they ‘never really liked my career anyway.’ Nobody understood that I was grieving (forget bringing over ice cream to help me through it!)

After 'the talk' with myself I tried working with a few different career coaches in the hopes that they could magically tell me what the hell I should do with my life (it totally doesn’t work that way btw).

In the search for “The One” I took ALL the quizzes, filled out the workbooks, took the online workshops - in essence I online dated the crap out of my career.

I WAS CONVINCED I’D BE A SAD, LONELY, OLD CAREER CAT LADY.

NOTHING seemed right and, man oh man, did I do some epic wallowing. Then, a coworker who had moved on to another company reached out. She knew I was miserable in my current relationship - uh, day job. I had jumped into yet another one that I knew I would hate out of self-pity or some such nonsense.

She wanted to introduce me to a new job. A new job that she knew I would rock. A job that played on all my strengths. A job where I got to teach people how to work together. Isn’t that always the way? A friend of a friend introduces you to the right thing?

Through this new gig, it became clear to me that I loved (and always had) helping people Find Their Thing and get the careers they were lusting after. The Thing that made them SO. FREAKING. STOKED.

It took another 2+ years for it to all come to fruition and it wasn't an easy or even a direct path but I now teach others how to find fulfillment in their own careers and there's no way I could be where I am without the heartbreak of having to give up being a professor.

I’m in love with my job in a whole new way and I can't imagine not being a coach.

Life’s funny that way huh?

Yours in ‘many careers in the sea’ goodness,

EBS

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