One year in

a reflection on work and meaning making

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve published an article, and a hectic few weeks full of twists and turns in my own life. I suppose the most groundbreaking piece of news is that I quit my job! I’ve wanted to do this for so long, and one day I just… did. But the decision was far from easy.

For those of you who aren’t in my closest circle and therefore haven’t heard me ramble on about this ad nauseum, well first of all consider yourselves lucky. Secondly, a little context: I have worked as a software engineer for over five years. During this time, I have run the gamut of employers from big tech conglomerates to pre-seed stage startups.

At the outset I was an ambitious new grad, eager to prove myself and advance in this lucrative field. It was 2019, I had just moved to New York City, and long days of work were followed by longer nights of partying. I felt like a hamster sprinting on a wheel until the world shut down in 2020 and I was abruptly ejected from my previous reality.

With the introduction of remote work, I became extremely disengaged and unmotivated. Days would pass where I wouldn’t glance at my computer, followed by periods of intense work fueled by guilt over my lack of output. If my employers had any inkling of what was happening, they never let on. I managed to fly under the radar, always meeting expectations but never quite exceeding them.

It was a gradual descent into apathy, punctured with brief moments of intense interest, but never enough to fully rouse me from my stupor. The “I don’t dream of labor” movement that took over my feed provided brief respite: where I previously felt like a failure for not being able to “grind” like other people, I was able to divorce my work from my identity and self-worth.

Thus began the next phase of my career. I gave myself permission to not strive, to not excel, to not climb corporate ladders, and to quietly resist expectations of grinding. I maintained a healthy level of removal from my work, viewing it as a means to an end – I work to live, I don’t live to work. I told myself that I didn’t have to like my work, I just had to do it so that I could afford the things I did like.

That’s not to say I never worked hard. Shortly after this paradigm shift, I joined a startup as the first engineering hire. I helped to assemble a world-class engineering team, and together we built a product that I was truly proud of. My first year at the company showed me that I didn’t inherently despise hard or challenging work. I struggled with intrinsic motivation, but I discovered that I was willing to push myself when I was interested in the work, had ownership over the product, and felt connected with my team.

However, in its second year, the company pivoted to a different direction than the vision I was initially sold. I felt my energy draining, and a familiar ennui creeped in. I did not fight it. I settled into a state of comfort - nay, complacency - and might have contentedly existed in that state of barely scraping by if the company hadn’t been acquired and the entire tech team laid off last summer.

What followed were the stages of grief, followed by a lengthy period of introspection. While some of my teammates immediately took interviews and offers, I let myself wallow in my blossoming existential crisis. I took up ceramics, I read, I attended therapy, I journaled. It was through journalling that I came across an entry I wrote in May 2020, when I first began to ponder fulfillment outside of the context of my tech career:

Ok. So I like food. I like writing. That  means I should be a food writer, right? If only it were that easy.

I’m less interested in technique/fine dining and more interested in storytelling.

• Food + memories?

• Food + family?

• Food + emotions?

Food as a mechanism for sharing your story. Ultimately I care about how food fosters human connections. How through food, you can invite others in, express love, etc.

Kazuo Ishiguro: “Stories are about one person saying to another: ‘This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?’”

I don’t want to be a food writer. I want to be a food storyteller.

As I re-read those entries now in 2024, I’m equally surprised by how clearly and precisely I expressed what I wanted and saddened by how afraid I was to let myself go for it. My doubts and perfectionist tendencies quickly took hold, and my desire for food storytelling fell to the wayside until I picked up my journal again after getting laid off last year. I realized that I felt as strongly about food storytelling as I did in 2020, and added the following entry when considering what my next step would be:

I don’t want to prune the possibilities just yet. I want to follow the crumbs of my curiosity. I need to trust my gut.

I think that my final artifact(s) will be something I share with the world. I think that I will use my storytelling skills to weave the various threads into a cohesive whole. Along the way, I will aim for alignment. I will aim for joy and beauty. I will endeavor to capture the human condition honestly by learning and observing a wide variety of perspectives.

I have been given a unique opportunity. I’ve been thrust from my comfortable cocoon into unfamiliar territory, but I also have the tools to explore. Books, art, other people. It is my duty to make the most of this opportunity and share my findings with the world.

A couple of weeks later, inspiration struck, and I sat down and penned my first post “Does the world need another food blog?”. I didn’t have a plan beyond that, no content strategy or backlog. I just kind of dove head first, a display of trust in myself and in the universe that I was not accustomed to. But I dove, and I wrote. Week after week, I wrote. At first I was worried that nobody would want to talk to me, but so many people have proven me wrong and opportunities for food storytelling kept arising.

When I reflect on starting this food blog a year ago, I think what I’m most proud of is that I overcame doubt - I overcame all those voices inside my head telling me I wasn’t good enough - and I created. I applied myself with a consistency that surprised even myself, and eventually built up a corpus of writing on my blog as I built up a platform on Instagram as I built up a beautiful community of like-minded (aka food-minded) individuals IRL.

As wonderful as running my food blog was, the realities of living in one of the most expensive cities in the world set in. Late last year, I entered the most recent phase of my tech career. I reached out to a previous coworker and managed to land a software engineering job that promised work-life balance. I didn’t care much for the company or the product, but I convinced myself that would not be an issue. My mindset going into this job was that I would take advantage of the salary, visa, and work/life balance in order to continue building my food blog.

It was a bit of an experiment: would I have an easier time working at a boring corporate job if I was simultaneously pursuing something I was passionate about? I think in my heart of hearts, I wasn’t optimistic, but I tried to be pragmatic – running a food blog in NYC is not cheap. Before I started the job, I felt a low-grade dread in my stomach, and that never quite went away. As the months passed, the evidence mounted that the engagement I felt with my food blog could not mitigate the disengagement I felt at work. If anything, it felt worse to feel excited about something and have to force myself to work on something else.

An artist friend of mine once described a strain of burnout that was not caused by hustling to the point of exhaustion, but by existing in a prolonged state of misalignment. I could relate heavily. I had a hard time sitting down and doing my tech job, because I cared so little for it. But that didn’t result in a carefree existence where I frolicked to my heart’s content. Instead, I was bogged down by the ever-present guilt. I was too unmotivated to work, too anxious to quit, and too ashamed to do anything else. I ended up spending a lot of time napping. I napped a concerning amount this past year.

The months passed while my inner turmoil continued to exacerbate. I knew I was not long for this job, but still I clung to it, because I wanted to maintain the status quo. It made me feel safe, albeit miserable. Then one day, I simply decided that I couldn’t go on like this anymore. I thought my inevitable decision to quit would resemble a volcano erupting, but it played out more like that allegory of the frog being slowly boiled alive until I jumped out of the pot. Sorry if that was dramatic.

It took a lot of courage to finally pull the plug. I pingponged between self-judgment (“Why can’t I just put my head down and work like other people?”) and self-doubt (“What if I go all in on my food blog and still fail?”) to guilt (“Other people would kill for this job… why am I just throwing it away?”). I grappled with my privilege (personal savings, a supportive partner and parents) that enabled me to even be able to make a decision like this. I thought to myself, “Other people work jobs they don’t like to make a living, why do I think I’m the exception?” In my darker moments, I wondered if I was a serious adult, a functioning human, even.

Something my therapist is constantly reminding me is about the importance of dialectics, that nothing is completely black and white and that two things can be true at once. I can hate my job and still show up, which I tried to do for as long as I could. I can acknowledge that I am extremely privileged without beating myself up for exercising that privilege. I’m learning through therapy that I should be kinder to myself, and that one of the ultimate forms of kindness is to honor my feelings instead of repressing them.

I wish I could provide more insight into how I finally reached the decision to quit. I went round and round with myself for so long, making decisions and then second-guessing myself almost immediately. I cannot emphasize how much tension I felt deep inside, how much cognitive dissonance I tried to live with, how much I tried to normalize living with such misalignment in my soul. I wish I could describe a step-by-step process I underwent to feel better, how I made continual progress until one day I achieved clarity.

Instead, I woke up one day and decided that I no longer wanted to continue at this job and that was it. Rather anticlimactic isn’t it? That’s not to undermine the loads of work that went into reaching this point. Through therapy I learned how to trust myself and to give myself permission to leave a situation that no longer served me. Through my food blog, I learned that I missed striving, I missed excelling, I missed caring about the work that I was doing, and pouring myself into my projects, and feeling proud of the final product and like I was making a difference, however small, in the world.

And so I turn the page on a new chapter, armed with the support of my loved ones, with my own hard-earned trust, and with a healthy dose of delusion. I’m still riddled with doubts – does the world really need more stories and am I the right person to share them? – but am no longer willing to bow to my anxiety. I’m excited to pursue my passions wholeheartedly, to keep sharing the stories that I think the world needs and chasing connections and seeking alignment.

Have you ever struggled with work/career/misalignment? I’d love to hear from you at brooklynfoodlady@gmail.com!