When your job is your identity, what's left when you leave it?
It's taken me ten years to find the answer
The other day somebody pointed out that it’s almost ten years since I left my “dream job”. I had fought and struggled and slogged my way to the so-called top (ish) of the magazine industry. (Remember that?) And then for various reasons, some of which I’ve written about before, I looked around and felt… nothing.
Well, to be frank, what I mainly felt was knackered, jaded, and not a little disaffected. I was 46 when I walked into my boss’s office and told her (yes, her, I know, a rarity!) I was done. I was so much my job that she said she didn’t believe me and continued to hold that view until the letter confirming it appeared on her desk a couple of days later.
If that sounds insulting, it really wasn’t, because I was my job and my job was me. If you’d cut off my head I’m pretty sure you would have seen Red magazine running around my neck like a stick of rock. For five, six years, I loved that job, that magazine, those readers, more…