I Quit My Job!

Last week, May 4th, marked my one-month mark since I quit my retail job, you know that job that made me hate myself?

It’s already, or only, May, I’m still not sure what way I want to look at it, but either way, we’re five months in and 2022 has been a crazy year. I have big plans and want to put a lot more energy into this blog moving ahead, but before I start pumping out content again, I thought I should take a minute, bring everyone up to speed and fill you all in on where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to. (Especially considering this website has been essentially stagnant since February.)

So way back in February of 2021, I shared with you all that I had gotten a retail job to sustain myself during the pandemic. The job was hard mentally on me. I won’t hash it all out, I’ll just link it here if you want to go read about it. In my post, I said things were getting better, and they were, but honestly, they never got all the way better. I never got happy or even content. I did luckily start to make friends and that helped, but it seemed like every time I would start to fall into a tolerable rhythm at work my entire work schedule would get shaken up and I’d be right back to miserable again.

A double edge sword in this whole situation was that I guess I was a good worker and good at what I did. I don’t want to risk identifying what retail store I worked at by naming any titles or duties specifically, but I will just say they for the most part they were giving me pretty consistent hours and more and more responsibilities. But I wasn’t happy. I dreaded going to work. I dreaded being at work. Every day was just a countdown to my next day off.

Now back at the start of this year when I wrote out my resolutions. One of my resolutions was to start a side hustle or even better be able to sustain myself freelancing. I put them together to be more realistic, but by the time my birthday rolled around at the end of January I had essentially decided I was done playing with the idea of going back to work (my past career) and that I didn’t want to work for or be tied to an office ever again. I had decided that this year I was going to put all my energy into finding a way to work for myself, to freelance (or anything else that makes me happy) full-time so that I would be in control of my time and my life and be able to start working towards the life I want for myself.

Well, I’ve never been great at positive thinking, optimistic maybe, but I’ve always been the type of person prepared for the worse. And I’ve never been one to practice sending out into the universe what you want or vision boards or manifesting or any of those other types of things you can think of, but let me tell you that shit is real. That shit works. (Either that or the universe had finally felt I had been tested enough and decided to throw me a bone.)

As soon as I started telling myself that that was the plan and started thinking that it was going to happen and started making plans for it to happen, things started to fall into place before I even had a chance to start pushing for it.

By the end of February, before I had even started posting about my plans, sharing my plans with friends and family, or reaching out to past clients, I had three inquiries come to me. Three different people from my past reached out to me, unsolicited, and two of those inquiries developed into actual jobs. (That third one, now that life has calmed down a bit, I need to reach back out to.)

By mid-March, I was on track to break even with what I was making at my retail job.

Originally I was planning to keep the retail job until I was able to secure another client/job that would leave me making more than I was currently bringing home from my retail job, but between the two writing jobs, school, and retail, I was running myself into the ground.

After a lot of debate and back and forth and encouragement from my husband I made the scary decision to put in my two-week notice and leave retail. (I’ve never quit a job before.) It finally came down to – I was killing myself trying to do it all and I figured the hours I was spending working retail was the time I needed to put into finding myself that third and/or fourth job.

April ended up being an overly hectic month, kicked off with a car accident along with some other things, so I do have to sadly report that I haven’t been able to grow any further than I was in March. But the year isn’t even halfway over yet and I’ve already accomplished more than I expected to do this entire year. If you would have asked me back in January where I see myself in six months I would have never guessed I’d be happily working from home, making my own hours. I still need to hustle, I still have a lot of plans, and I still have a long way to go, but I’m here, I’m excited, and I’m capable!