5 years ago I moved to Seattle with $3,000 in the bank and no plan. 2009 had been... hectic. Wonderful. Exhausting. Heartbreaking. But that's another blog post. I came to Seattle largely because I needed to get out of Spokane and thought Seattle could become a permanent home. It helped that everything I owned fit into my car. It also helped that I had been living on about a thousand dollars a month in Spokane so $3k looked like three months worth of expenses. I was sure I'd figure something out before I ran out of cash.
In January of 2010 joblessness in my age group hovered at about 40%. The recession hit millenials hard and a lot of people I knew were going back to school to get a masters degree because there were no jobs; much less jobs that seemed appropriate for someone who was educated. At that time I was 25 and while I'd had a lot of jobs I'd never worked full time and a degree in French horn performance has somewhat limited applications. At the end of December I had sent my resume or applied to about 50 positions and had I heard back from one - a generic sounding "Business Careers" that promised placement in full time jobs with benefits.
I was pretty sure that Business Careers was some sort of job scam but I didn't have much else to do so I went to check it out anyway. They wound up being totally legit. During my first interview they asked me whether I wanted to continue working in finance. I didn't, but in the absence of any real plan on my part they convinced me that applying for jobs in an area where I had experience was my best chance for getting any job. Four days later I landed a position as a receptionist at a mid-sized broker/dealer downtown Seattle.
After six months I decided to try to see if I could make finance fun enough to want to stay.
In a year I had three licenses and two promotions.
In two years I managed to move to my department of choice.
In three years I had forgotten that the entire career had started as an experiment.
In four years I got bored.
This summer it was no longer possible to ignore just how unhappy I was with the work.
(I want to be clear here: this isn't an ethics thing. I don't have a moral problem with the industry per se. I do think that there are massive problems related to the financial services industry that need to be addressed in a much more nuanced fashion than the current national dialog allows.)
It's hard not to feel a little like I've wound up right back where I started. They say that if you're not sure what you want to do for a living you should imagine what you would do if money were no object. That's never really helped me much. I think that if I were very wealthy I'd probably just dick around a lot. I'd work out a lot, read a lot, make music, write when I felt like it, take a bunch of classes, teach a little, travel a little, hang out with cool people, become a nap connoisseur.
I guess I could just do what I'm good at but in all honesty that's a long list. I'm good at all kinds of things I don't especially enjoy or care about. I'm good at my job now. It turns out that mantra 'you can do anything you want to do' has not become a freeing motto but rather a paralyzing array of options.
Clearly this is a problem for a professional. I went to a career counselor in the fall and while nothing she said was earth shattering our sessions served as a reminder of how much I enjoy technical things. Math. Logic. One of the reasons I applied for my first job in finance at Merrill Lynch was because I thought it would be math-y (it was not). I always sort of wanted to learn to code but other than a short stint in website creation I'd never had a reason to pursue it.
Until now.
I start coding classes in a couple of weeks. I still don't know if it's the 'right' thing but it does seem fun which is already a step up from a 5 year career in something I began for the sake of convenience. I'm nervous. As much as I know I need to leave my job it's hard to walk away from something so familiar - particularly since it's not a bad job or a bad place to work. It's just not right for me for now. There's still a part of me that thinks I could make a go of it if I just hunkered down and stuck it out but that part is getting a little smaller every day. I'm making the same leap of faith I made 5 years ago - but at least this time I have a plan.
