how to quit your job.

1. Before you can quit your job, you have to take the job.
2. So, you take the job. You take the full-time marketing job because it seems like the right thing to do as a girl in their thirties with a creative writing MFA. After years of adjucting and freelancing, the general hustle has gotten to you. And how nice is the pay and benefits? Who cares about morality or capitalism or corporate greed when you have 3 paid weeks off a year?
3. Justify all the reasons you are compromising your morals. You’re not really selling products, right? You’re writing blogs, email campaigns, website copy, and just casually mentioning that your product is better than the rest!
4. Feel your pulse race in meetings that talk about clickthrough rates and pay per customer and user personas and oh my god, Black Friday campaigns. We are not unique, we are consumers to be sold to and if you’re not growing, your shrinking, and I swear to god if we don’t see a 3% increase this year
5. Begin to phone it in. like, really phone it in. (hello, ai chatbot). The briefs are uninspired, the campaigns are lazy, your suggestions are never implemented, anyway. 
6. Grow sad. 
7. Feel better by writing, sometimes, and job searching. You’re getting out, right? 
8. Right. 
9. Quit, but not really: change positions. Stay in marketing, but make it for a university. Stay in marketing, but it’s for education, for gullible 18-year-olds. They pay is better, the benefits are better. Their hooks are still in. 
10.  Convince yourself. 
11.  Begin work on your new project: website strategy. Helping prospectives make informed decisions about their education. 
12.  Ignore: the fact that it’s a catholic university, the fact that your boss used to be the white house press secretary for George Bush, the fact that the marketing officer refers to students as customers
13.  Don’t ignore: the incompetence in your office, everyone’s miserable personality, that one office-manager-turned-project-manager with no fucking clue what was going on but still talked down to you like she did 
14.  Don’t ignore: that no one here truly understand what it will take to launch this project successfully, how your voice is swallowed whole in meetings, concerns quieted and made deaf over the screams of egos 
15. Your pulse quickens more, much more when it was just blogs and emails. 
16. What have you done. You have made this worse, not better.
17.  But you are a girl in your thirties with a creative writing MFA, and after years of adjuncting and freelancing, the general hustle has gotten to you. And how nice is pay and benefits? And who cares about morality or capitalism or corporate greed when you have 3 paid weeks off a year?
18. You. You care, a whole damn lot. 
19.  And you realize: you cannot do a job in which you don’t care. You spent all those years adjuncting and freelancing and hustling because you cared so much: cared about words, about how they’re arranged, about making the arrangement of words better – not just yours but other words: words your clients write, words your students write. All words matter. 
20.  This realization makes you feel better.
21. And writing, sometimes, and job searching. You’re getting out, right? 
22.  Right.
23.  And so, you do it: you find the local community college that has sections of English composition open for the Fall and you teach the fuck out of your demo lesson so they hire you on the spot and just like that you have classes again and freelancing and the hustle and oh it feels so good to quit and watch them squirm, even though you should not enjoy that part, you do, because this is about you, not them 
24.  This is how you do it: you realize who you are and you do not forget it: you safeguard it, keep it close, like a gold locket against your heart, beating full and ready with purpose.