I quit my job today.
But there was no drama to it—it wasn’t the typical story you see online, where a mistreated employee, full of piss and vinegar, says their righteous piece to The Man.
It was pretty quiet, actually. Threaded with moments of pained silence, an inability to maintain eye contact. And the sense—which I fought hard against feeling!—of letting someone down.
I’ve never liked that feeling.
The disappointment of others is not something I’ve ever handled well. Teachers, coaches, colleagues, bosses—I’ve dreaded the look.
We build up an idea in our minds of the people in our lives. It’s not them, of course—but it’s the best we can do. And then people live life, and do things, and say things, and we fiddle with our idea of them. We erase a line here, shade something in over there.
And then we desperately hope—naively—that the real person out there in the world tracks with the idea we’ve built.
For the people in our lives who we rely on, we depend on these ideas. And we hold dear the delightful few who—in the positive sense—prove utterly reliable. This person will show up for your party. This person will pick up when you call. This person will laugh at your joke.
I hunger for this in the people in my life. To think of what someone would think or say or do—-and to be right about it?—this is delight.
And to do or say something for someone else and, in that, make them happy? This is divine.
(I don’t do this nearly enough, of course.)
What is utterly and totally humbling is to consider that just as I have ideas of the people in my life, so do they—of me.
And that brings me back to quitting.
Because quitting—for me, as far as I could tell—seriously violated the idea that some colleagues had of me.
There was that disappointment—not one so much in me, as I’m their idea of me. As in “the Taylor I know to myself” would not quit.
That gulf there is the rub—I am not merely the sum of others’ ideas of me. It’s easy enough to let that thought seduce us, though. But what unending drudgery to spend your life managing this very ephemeral idea of yourself that you have only the most indirect control over!
So, like I said, I fought against feeling this sense of disappointment. Because it wasn’t disappointment in me, really. It was in themselves—after all, it’s only a lucky few of us (me not among them!) who are accurate artists of the people in our lives, drawing crisply and clearly so that the people never surprise and always delight with how they sync to their observers’ ideas.
Today, people I know were not so lucky.
Taylor Coe 