greetings from the afterlife
estate planning
I quit my job last Friday. Actually, I quit a month ago but Friday was my last day. I have a new job lined up for January— a better paid, more glamorous job at a gallery where I will get to travel for work and dress up for art openings, and that is all exciting and important— but the most exciting and important part was the leaving.
I had been at this job for seven years— a number that causes me to wince when I say it out loud. The job was in fine art crating, I guess I should say, but after seven years I figure you already knew that. It was the first job I got in Los Angeles. I started the day after the 2016 election— a surreal way to meet all of your coworkers for the first time. I spent four years in the woodshop, cutting plywood on the tablesaw and glue-staple-screwing everything together, and then another three years as the Crating Manager, visiting studios and museums to measure art and designing wooden boxes for it to go into.
This job has been the backdrop for my entire life in Los Angeles. I moved multiple times, fell in love, made friends— and the whole time I worked in the same windowless warehouse in East Los Angeles. Do not mistake this for sentimentality— I do not feel bittersweet about this. I stayed too long, anyone could have told you that. I was going to leave but, but, but. But, there was a global pandemic, but I got promoted, but job searching was exhausting, but it was the holidays.
I am disappointed in myself that I stayed this long, frustrated that I let myself give into inertia for years. I was miserable and then made peace with my misery and then sank back into it. All jobs are bad in their own ways, but I didn’t give myself a chance to escape this particular Bad Job. Ultimately I am excited about the new position I am stepping into, and I recognize I couldn’t have gotten it without this past job, and not without staying at the job long enough to get promoted and gain all of the extremely niche experience I have in this extremely niche field. It’s healthy to feel disappointed in yourself sometimes; disappointment can be a side effect of self-respect. I believe I was capable of more, and I am disappointed that I let myself be unhappy for so long because it felt easier.
Here is what I used to say about my job:
It was a job, not a career, and I liked that my ego and self worth were not attached to what I did for work
It was physically demanding but not mentally so, and I could come home at the end of the day with my brain untouched and bright, ready to write or make art or any of the other things more worthy of it.
It provided me with stability, which I personally need in order to be creative.
These things were all true, for a time. And so I kept saying them, after they stopped being true. Until eventually I realized I wasn’t making art, or writing, and came home from work and immediately spent an hour scrolling on my phone to decompress. I said I was there for the work life balance, but it didn’t afford for much life— the pay was demoralizing, the PTO abysmal.
When you stay at a job for seven years you become a frog in a boiling pot. Things grew more dysfunctional around me, coworkers fell away until I was the third most senior employee at our location. I could feel the life slowly draining out of my body. The longer I stayed, the harder it felt to leave.
Putting in notice feels a lot like planning your own funeral. I gave four week’s notice (more generous than I needed, but I decided I could afford to be generous), not that they used that extra time to prepare for my departure whatsoever. Four weeks to settle my estate: decide what was on my woodshop bucket list before I lost access to the industrial table saw and endless supply of free plywood (I built an entire rolling kitchen island with a built in trash compartment in my last four days of work), do my Swedish death cleaning (take all of my scrap bits of walnut and birch home), and determine my legacy (put together training documents and vendor spreadsheets).
Even when you don’t like your job, which I didn’t, and don’t think you tried that hard at it, which I also didn’t— there is a strange compulsion to end things on a good note, with no loose threads. Maybe it's the latent high achiever in me, or maybe it’s a need to be liked. I think most likely it is the human impulse to create and protect one’s legacy.
I write my own obituary every year and get it notarized as part of my art practice. One year I will die, and the latest obituary will be published as my official obituary. I do it because I have always been gripped with a compulsion to be in control of the narrative, but its greater value is documenting how my self narrative shifts over time, plot points and morals recontextualized. Estate planning is for those left behind who will have to sort out a life’s worth of mess, but it is also for the dying— to be able to go gently into the afterlife without any outstanding obligations.
I am also feeling a bit vindictive, I can admit it. As someone who is innately a tempered, measured person, vindictiveness feels like a little treat to give myself. And after seven years, don’t I deserve a little treat? I don’t want to set them up to fail— no, my vindictiveness is more conniving, more refined than that. I want to give them every possible resource to succeed so when they fail despite of that, they will feel the entirety of that weight.
Like dying, quitting can bring up a lot of emotions and existential questions. And like dying, once you have finally quit, nothing you did really matters. I believe I have included all the lumber and foam and hot glue stick vendors in my color coded spreadsheet, but ultimately if I didn’t, they will figure it out. I prepped dozens of crate designs for them to work through before I left, and one day they will finish them and need to figure out how to do it themselves. And if they can’t? Well, that doesn’t seem like the end of the world anyways. Like many companies, mine was dysfunctional and pointless, and the clown bus will continue to offroad its way towards the sunset without me.
How does dying feel? It feels amazing, thank you so much for asking. I wrote the entire first draft of this newsletter in one afternoon at a coffee shop, which more words than I’ve been able to pull out of myself in a single sitting in years. I am excited for a full five weeks off to read and write and climb and work on art.
Thank you for reading, this newsletter has been my companion for the entirety of this job. The early tinyletters were written standing up on my phone in the woodshop. If you have been in a long job search, or have overstayed at a company, I feel for you. Getting out is hard, but not as hard as you think it will be.
Talk soon,
Nicole