Why you should leave a job you love

I did it and this is why...

I left magazines a year before I handed in my notice. In my head it was over in the summer of 2020. But it took me 12 long months before I actually walked away. I guess I was confused by own feelings. After all, the idea of leaving something you love is unsettling. Or at least it was for me. I have walked out of bad relationships, and I am easy (some would say cruel, even) at calling time on friendships that no longer work. Closing the door on things that feel as though they can no longer be fixed is relatively simple. But what about when the thing in front of you is perfectly good? Why would anyone quit something when it feels like it still works? Still, this is how I felt.

You see, magazines have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I grew up in Salford, an inner suburb of Manchester, whose claim to fame back then was Strangeways Prison and Morrissey. Magazines then felt like a free pass into a different world. My mother read magazines. So did my elder sister. As a twelve-year old I would go round to my grandfather’s house on a Thursday evening to play the guitar. But mainly I went because he bought me a copy of Just 17.

I got lucky. In the early 2000s, I sent a bunch of emails and stumbled upon a job on a magazine called Woman and Home. Sure, I was writing about things like perimenopause and hypertension, but it didn’t matter. I was ‘in’ and being ‘in’ it turned out, was what magazines were all about. Getting in, fitting in, feeling you were part of the ‘in’ crowd, being ‘in’ fashion. ‘In’ was the currency that kept us alive. 

For a while I bounced from job to job: Good Housekeeping, Glamour, Marie Claire and finally my own editorship of a title called Women’s Health which I launched with a clutch of colleagues in the cold winter of 2012. The work was joyous, infinitely varied and always juicy - journalists are terrific company, being both delicious gossips and expert storytellers. But it was also the world of magazines that got me. Everyone, and I mean everyone, in magazines was fabulous. Things like blow dries and weekly manicures and blowing your entire pay cheque on a pair of Prada shoes was totally normal. There was a man who used to come into work every day in a velvet cloak and a feather in his hat, without a hint of irony. We used to have beauty sales, where all the products that came into the office were sold off at rock bottom prices for charity. For the longest time I couldn’t afford to pay my rent, but I did have a cupboard full of £250 eye creams and perfumes that costs more than a night in a five-star hotel. I was sent around the world too- Japan to interview a Hollywood actress for all of twelve minutes; Beijing for the launch of a new handbag. If you worked on a glossy magazine you were invited to film premiers, restaurant openings, new bars that were impossible to get into and parties where you rubbed shoulders with actual celebrities. The pay was never good, that’s the rub of journalism, but you clung on because you felt part of something. You felt wanted. You felt, I suppose, someone.

Over time I became, I think, a good editor. Some might say talented. I certainly won some awards which are suppose to validate such thoughts. And I had figured out how to push people -writers, editors, stylists, towards what I hope was better work. I was also confident about my craft. That is to say, I could talk about magazine journalism uninterrupted, in front of a crowded room for a good two hours. Basically, at 42 years of age, I was about as happy as I could be in a career that I loved. Which is exactly why I decided to walk away.

I know this sounds like madness. And yes, I fully admit that there were, of course, background fears about the longevity of a career as a magazine editor. (Dealing in paper and gloss in a world of digital and honesty, isn’t easy). But really, they were only small concerns. I never thought magazines would fade away completely. I always thought I could make a living somehow, even if it was no longer the big career I had once had. No, it was something else.

One morning, as I sat down to work in the small ‘office space’ I had crafted in lockdown (and which is basically the corner of the guest bedroom) I felt different. I had a long piece of copy that needed editing. It wasn’t working. A writer had gone off on a tangent and the piece, though entertaining, was never going to work in the pages of ELLE. Editing a piece of wayward copy was always my thing. I love the process of finding the thread of a story that perhaps a writer has missed, and pulling it to the surface. But not this time. Instead I felt nothing. Nothing was a new feeling to me within the context of my career. Anger? Sure, happened all the time. Joy? Most of my career actually. But nothing was a sensation (for it is a sensation if you allow yourself to feel it) that followed me around much of 2020. I no longer burned with excitement when a writer pitched a genius idea. And I no longer crackled with energy when confronted with an empty cover that needed bringing to life. It was not a bad feeling. It was simple a gentle, easy, pleasant you might even say, nothingness. ’You’ve changed,’ said my husband, when we crossed paths in the kitchen to make tea one morning. He’s a writer too. Lockdown meant I had invaded his world, and so we worked out a rhythm that meant we rarely saw one another during the day. (I did the morning dog walk, he did the afternoon. I would answer the door to delivery men before 2pm. He did the honours after). I didn’t ask him to elaborate. I knew what he meant. 

We have a tendency to anthropomorphize our jobs. Work is such a bitch. I’m in love with my job. I just can’t connect with my new gig.  And in some ways we are right to, since many of us devote so much of our lives to them. But jobs are not people.  They are you within the context of that job. That’s why I get nutty when self help articles remind people that a job is not your identity. Of course it is. Though I do believe that we should never objectify ourselves according to our careers.  How you behave and love and work within your career is a part of you. Which is exactly why you feel such a flooding loss of identity when you part with it. 

During my year of nothingness, I won a relatively big award. The trophy arrived in the post- a cold, phallic thing with my name engraved in tiny letters on the front. Years earlier I would have jitterbugged around the room at such a thing. Instead I took it out of its box and placed it lovingly in the drawer under my bed, along with every other award I had won for my efforts as an editor. Yes they made me happy, but not in the same way they once did.

We are taught not to question happiness, only unhappiness. To do so is seen as both churlish and ungrateful, since happiness is a state the world spends its’ time searching for. But in not questioning happiness  we thwart our potential to shift and change. Because happiness has its traps. The cruelest of which is that it cannot be sustained. The happier we are, the more we need to maintain it. Which is why my awards no longer meant anything, and why even a good day at work left me feeling blank. What’s more, happiness is often at odds with our natural human desire to move forward. That is why, and mad as I’m going to sound right now, perhaps unhappiness is sometimes what is needed. Unhappiness is the thing that can motivate us to move forward, achieve and grow. Ironically the very things that ultimately make us happy, albeit briefly.

In the end my career couldn’t give me anymore. I had taken from it what I could. And in return it had given me all it was able to offer. It was over. They say you never feel closer in a relationship than at the moment of saying goodbye. The searing honesty that things have run their course, brings with it an intimacy that is rarely matched. That’s how I felt about my twenty years in magazines. But I felt another thing too, which I think is worth knowing. I realised that walking away from something that made me happy, was a sign I was aware of the person I had the potential to be. Which of course, brought its own joy.

I chose a twenty-minute farewell party in the company refectory. I wanted nothing more than warm champagne and a few short speeches.  Someone stole the champagne. I forgot most of what I wanted to say. No one cried. It was perfect.

When I got home that night, I sat on the sofa, my dog, Parker, curled up beside me, her nose on the edge of my knee.  I did not cry or lament what I had left behind. I felt only happiness. A soaring, giant happiness that had eclipsed me for the longest time.

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How do you feel about this? Have you ever walked away from something that made you happy? Was it the right thing to do in retrospect? I’m intrigued to know