Two years ago, I made the abrupt decision to end my library career. If you combine that career with my previous time at a bookstore, I spent over 30 years working for institutions that either lent or sold books. My decision was abrupt in that it came earlier than I had planned, but I’d seen it coming for a long time. In fact, it was a moment of failure that I had feared for almost as long as I can remember.
As far back as elementary school, I would wake up and face almost every day with at least some amount of dread and resentment—dread for the places where I didn’t want to be doing things I didn’t want to do and resentment for the crushing sense of obligation that made me go there and do those things anyway. I feared that one day, I just wouldn’t be able to do it anymore, so I tried to keep my momentum going. In my professional life, I rarely took more than a day or two off at a time largely for this reason.
Not every day was bad. I found moments of triumph and happiness along the way, but problems big and small never stopped piling up. No one thing broke me. I can’t blame my employers. I can’t blame my family. I can’t blame unfortunate events. I can’t blame anyone or anything but myself.
I opened 2020 with a professional victory, but it was a victory I’d pursued for almost all of my supervisory career. I can’t take credit, but it was an achievement I’d wanted—recognition and compensation for the talented individuals I had recruited, trained, and led. However much this long overdue victory added to my momentum, though, it was immediately absorbed by the covid emergency and the chaos that followed.
By 2022, my nominal “retirement” date was just over four years away. Early as that might seem, I had already pushed it back when I decided to leave California a decade ago. Nevertheless, my feared crash finally came that March, and it came in a question from my wife. Why do you care so much more about work than about your family?
My momentum failed, and I fell flat on my face. I pounded my fist on the table, shouting my answer. I don’t care about work more than my family. I prioritize work because I feel like I have to, and I have fucking hated it almost every single day.
Those who know me also know that hate is not a word I apply lightly.
But I was well and truly broken. I may as well have been 10 years old again, sitting in the principal’s office at my elementary school, shedding hopeless tears, and wondering how I could make it through even one more day. I wondered that once more, but this time I couldn’t go forward—at least not on the same path.
We don’t get what we want, and I know that. Life is unfair, and the universe is completely and utterly indifferent to our concerns. The things I actually wanted out of life have been achieved only fleetingly at best, and most remain out of reach or appear permanently foreclosed at this point. Caveat: I acknowledge that permanence and foreclosure may be artificial limiters, but that’s not a topic for this post.
Call it a midlife crisis—or an existential crisis, as my daughter would say—but I had to make a change. I had to find another way to live. Much to my wife’s disappointment, I had to find something that was about more than just putting another paycheck in the bank. Money was never the most important thing for me, and I know that’s too easy for me to say as someone who has almost never wanted for the lack of it. Nevertheless, my decision was about much more than a career change.
And that brings me back to why I worked in libraries and bookstores. These institutions sit at the end of the literary supply chain, but I’ve always wanted to work at its beginning. Ever since I first decoded the written word, I have imagined writing my own fanciful stories. Of course, throughout all those years of imagining, I had made essentially no progress.
I told myself that I needed more time to focus. I needed opportunities that I didn’t have due to all of my other responsibilities. Well, quite unintentionally, I’ve managed to carve that opportunity into my reality. I still have plenty of things to do, but now I can find a few hours for writing without stealing them from tomorrow. No more excuses; it’s time to put up or shut up.
Ironically, though I just pointed out my perpetual lack of progress, I was starting to make actual headway during the last few years. While that progress had come mostly to a halt during all the recent stress, I had accomplished something that I never had before. I had plotted a complete story arc with a beginning, a middle, and an end—and I had started drafting chapters.
It’s funny, embarrassing even, because this project was completely unexpected. Instead of my usual dabbles in science fiction and fantasy, something my daughter said inspired a “realistic” idea that became the story of an awkward romance between a struggling writer and an ambitious academic. Yes, in part and on multiple levels, it’s going to be a novel about writing, which has been done many times before, but I think my approach will at least follow a less well-traveled route.
This novel will almost certainly be trash and will probably never see the light of day, but plenty of trash does get published. Either way, I’m going to finish it. I’ve written hundreds of pages of story notes and character profiles, and I now have 12 more-or-less complete chapters in draft, covering the story’s first act.
I have a long way to go, but at least I have a map to follow this time. Nothing stands still either, and life has accelerated again since the end of my wage-trade career. My business and other responsibilities demand more and more of my time, so my writing has predictably slowed. Though I started them over a year ago, Chapters 11 and 12 remain unfinished—in part because I’ve been trying to write them in the wrong order.
My novel itself has also become just one segment of a larger tapestry. I follow inspiration where it takes me and am usually but not always pleased with the results. My characters have minds of their own and won’t necessarily do what I want them to. Shocking, I know.
Whether or not it’s only my first installment, I’ve given myself a rather luxurious five-year deadline for completing the project. This is partly for historical reasons. Early on, I decided that the story would be set in 2024, perhaps because I thought I could mine some droll political humor from an election year and add another source of interpersonal conflict to a story that lacks even a little dash of fisticuffs. Well, that detail turned into something more … interesting than I had predicted, but now I’m committed to the bit.
So, after a lifetime of dreaming, I’m finally poised to achieve some literary success—however personal it may be. I don’t have to publish. I just have to finish the novel. Whether it’s trash or something special, that’s what matters. Either way, then I can move on.
I wish doing so would solve all my problems, but of course it won’t. Leaving all the bullshit of public-sector employment behind didn’t solve my marital problems. Indeed, I’ve wondered more than once since then if I quit the wrong institution, but as my fictional heroine’s mother will remind my would-be narrator, nothing is ever perfect.
When I wake up tomorrow, though, the new day won’t fill me with dread and resentment. I think I’m done with that … forever.
