Musings on my first time quitting a job

In my last post, I mentioned I was stressed over an interview. Well, I ended up getting an offer and accepted it, and have since officially quit my previous job. I start the new job on the upcoming Monday. Summarizing it like that makes it sound like it was a fun and easy process, but I’ve been so incredibly anxious and stressed I feel myself returning to my high school levels of anxiety. This applies to all aspects of my life, not just work.

So I wanted to talk a bit about what I struggled with, why I did it anyways, and other things I’ve been thinking about in relation to work and life. I’m an emotional person, and every step of this journey was deeply challenging. I’ve been doing a lot of knitting to cope, I finished my sweater from my last blog post and a pair of mittens.

Part 1: gathering the motivation to look for a new job

I don’t want to get too much into why I quit my past job. It was at a large tech company and I had a lot of issues; some of them were related to my team, some were related to upper management, and none of them were improving. In fact, things were actively getting worse, especially for the area I specialized in and cared about. Over 6 months ago, once my injury was doing better (I’ll talk more about this one day) I started looking for a new internal role. But I also wanted to remain remote, because of my injury and needing flexibility, which made this incredibly difficult.

I resisted looking externally because an external position would mean technical interviews. The thought of preparing for technical interviews via leetcode made me nauseous. The thought of actually doing a technical interview made me want to throw up. Every day I told myself, tonight I’ll write my resume… and ever night, I pushed it to the next day.

How did I get over this motivation hurdle? How could you get over this motivation hurdle? The truth is I cracked, things got so bad at work that the need to leave was so strong it overwhelmed the anxiety and the fear. I was probably crying, but I wrote my resume, asked 2 friends to review it, and started applying to jobs before they even replied. (The resume I submitted to the position I ended up getting hired for even had a dead link that went nowhere.)

I set myself a low goal of 3 jobs per week, and also that I was going to be extremely picky. I was only going to apply to fully remote jobs in Canada, and only in areas I was interested in. Finance or AI? No thanks, not for me. I didn’t want to leave my job just to go do a job that was even worse. This greatly reduced the number of open positions, and also reduced a lot of the overwhelm I felt when looking for jobs. There weren’t that many jobs that fit my narrow requirement, so it didn’t take too much effort to look and apply.

I mentally prepared myself for the anxiety I knew I was going to have before the technical interview. It was bad, but I had steeled myself because I knew it was going to be. The day before the interview, I was groggy and brain foggy and tired, but I sat down to study and something unimaginable happened. I had fun. I was suddenly more awake, I was excited, and I was motivated. I was still incredibly nervous before and during the interview, but I reminded myself that I do love learning. I wouldn’t have so many hobbies if I didn’t, and I have way too many hobbies. My partner keeps begging me to not pick up a new space-occupying hobby. I’ve been picking up a lot of creative hobbies, but I also used to love writing code and it’s been a long time since I last actually enjoyed doing it.

Part 2: “what ifs” and self-gaslighting

I thought once the interviews were over, once I received the offer, the anxiety would end. I wanted this, in fact I wanted it daily for months. But once I got the offer, I felt dumb. Why did I want to leave? Things weren’t that bad at work, things were fine! I was overreacting, I should just calm down. I’ll miss x, y, and z, and my coworkers are great people.

My partner smacked me on the head with a newspaper (metaphorically, not really) and reminded me I was being an idiot. The list of problems greatly out-weighted the benefits, and I was incredibly burnt out. More than anything, I needed a change of pace. He was right, but I kept falling into that self-gaslighting and minimizing of my emotions, so talking to people close to me helped a lot. It helped me regulate, but also it meant I was super annoying to all of my friends for days. To prevent overwhelming a single one with all my doubts and fears, I alternated daily who I was going to stress to, instead of doing all my friends every day.

Once I was over that hill, the other doubts started to roll in: the “what ifs”. What if the new job was worse? What if I regretted it? What if the new job, which was less pay but not enough to change my quality of life, held me back from my goals? What if the offer was suddenly revoked after signing, and I was suddenly left with 0 jobs? (I don’t think this is legal, but that’s not going to help me in the moment). What if I regretted it? What if? A lot of these were not realistic, but a lot of them were really important and hard to get over. I had to keep telling myself, well I can always either go back or find a new job. I had to challenge myself: I was bored and tired, and the new would help me grow, even if it wasn’t perfect. I wanted to learn something new, and fuck all the anxiety I was going to do it.

At the bottom of both of these emotions is just the fear of change. I was complacent, and doing something about how unhappy I was took way more effort than just being unhappy. I had been in this job for almost 6 years, longer than I had been in high school or university. Leaving felt like losing a part of my identity, this job had been part of me for my entire adult life. But I don’t want to be unhappy, and I needed to do this… even if I have to keep reminding myself of that every hour, or if I need to have the people I love also remind me.

Part 3: how do you actually quit a job?

Well, I made my decision. I signed the offer. Surely, now the anxiety would lessen, because the decision was made. Hahaha… what a dream. Instead I was suddenly hit with the next wall to overcome; how do you actually quit a job? My previous job was my first job post graduating, and my first full-time position. I had done several internships beforehand, or tutored kids, but all of these came with a fixed end date. The end of term, the end of the contract. I had never done continuous work like this before.

Obviously, I had to tell my manager. That was the hardest, it took me until the last minute of our weekly 1:1 until I finally had the nerve to actually speak the words. My face went numb and I got a migraine, and I had to take my migraine meds after the meeting. Then I had to send an email to my manager, reiterating in writing what I had just said out loud. Then I had to submit my resignation letter. Then I had to gather up all the docs I had ever written, and put them in a shared folder, which was incredibly hard emotionally. Then I had to tell the rest of my team, all these people I had worked daily with for literal years, who depended on me, that I was leaving. Each of these steps felt like the hardest things I had (maybe not ever, but in a long time) done.

On the plus side, I had been procrastinating booking an optometrist appointment for weeks because I didn’t want to make a phone call. When I was sitting there crying, looking at the records of everything I had worked so hard for the past 6 years, that suddenly felt overwhelmingly pointless, I was no longer afraid of making that phone call. How could it be harder than the 1:1 I just had? It couldn’t be, so I made the phone call, and now I have an updated prescription. (Not that I wear my glasses, I just increase the zoom on my laptop and enjoy being farsighted when away from my desk).

I hope the next time I quit a job it’s easier than the first time.

Part 4: work relationships

Unsurprisingly, saying goodbye to my coworkers on my last day was also hard. This ties in with another topic I want to discuss more, which is the strangeness of work relationships. They’re nothing like any kind of relationship I had ever before in my life, at school, or with fellow interns. I find this is especially strange with coworkers at a similar seniority level, having a manager is a lot like having a more dedicated teacher or a less intimate parent.

In general, I really struggle with work relationships and with understanding the correct level of boundaries and friendliness. I’m an over-sharer, I love talking, I love listening to other people talk… why else would I be writing all this for no reason with no one to read? It’s a way to give my partner a break from listening to me ramble.

I spend more time with my coworkers than any other person in my life, but also any personal questions should be avoided. So I know all these people on a surface level, but I don’t know who or where or what they go home to every day, I don’t ever see them outside of the office (or video call), but I also speak to them every single day.

On my last day, many of my coworkers shared stories about the first time they met me. They thanked me for making them feel included, which is something I always strive to achieve when the team gets a new member. We reminisced over events in the past, team events, and funny outages. We bonded about struggling and succeeding together. It was really sentimental. I have some coworkers I’ve gotten close enough to that I will keep in touch and still talk to frequently, but for the large majority? I will never see or speak to them again, after years of daily interacting. And that’s it? It just ends.

Thinking about it, I guess that is a lot like graduating high school or university. Most of those people I said goodbye to one day, and never saw again. But it was almost easier, because we were all experiencing the same thing, and we had mentally prepared ourselves every day for 4 years, because we knew exactly when that day would come. We had known since we were toddlers, that one day school would end.

It’s strange to think that there is this whole world, virtually above me in the cloud, down the street in the office, that I used to be a part of daily, that will continue chugging without me and eventually forevermore without any of us, until the day it no longer is. None of the people who were on my team, that first day 6 years ago, are still on that same team, yet it and the product still exists.

Conclusion

Well, that was a bit heavy. Let’s completely change topic and discuss my new stickers arrived yesterday!

Riki is

• two years old,
• tiny,
• and a rescue.

She’s a scaredy cat, which is a big contrast to my other cat. Zlatko is

• very orange,
• tall,
• just turned 16,
• and was an outdoor cat for 10+ years.

Zlatko’s reaction to anything new is intense curiosity, he hates closed doors, and must inspect everything he can. He’s pretty dog like, and will come out to greet guests.

Riki will be terrified of a brand new carpet for days and hide under the bed when the doorbell rings. But she will step on the new carpet on the first day. She crouches down, walking low to the ground with airplane ears, but she still does it.

Me and my partner like to call her the “Queen of doing it scared”, and we use this to motivate eachother to just do things even if we’re scared of them. It works surprisingly well, so I made these stickers as a surprise gift to my partner. I plan to put them somewhere I can see on my first day at my new job.