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How I Knew It Was Time to Leave My Job
I had written a bestselling book, but I was still in battle mode, afraid to quit scrapping for a living
When I was 26 years old, I started my own little legal practice. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Three years later, I got married, and a while after that we had our first baby. Life was pretty sweet. Okay, we worked longer hours than was strictly healthy, I didn’t particularly like my job, and all of that caused a few problems, but we knew we were lucky. We could pay our bills, we loved each other, our kid was healthy. What more do you need, right?
Then the subprime crisis hit the United States.
The knock-on effect in Ireland, where we lived, was cataclysmic. The mad merry-go-round of easy credit crashed to a halt, house prices were cut in half, and the job losses, pay cuts, and tax increases began. For three years, we tried to make it work. I remember very little of that time now. It’s lost in a haze of stress and tiredness and worry. In the end, I had to close the practice. It sounds simple, final: Close a practice. It took a year. A year of unpaid work to try to close the door on my painful failure.
It was 2011. We were 34 years old and wanted a fresh start, so we made the obvious choice. We made the short hop over the pond and emigrated to Western Australia. Ahem.
Five weeks later, our second child arrived. We were alone, 9,000 miles from home with two small children. We worked hard, tried to repair the financial mess that had sent us there. Australia offered us opportunities we couldn’t find in Ireland. Well-paid engineering work for my husband. A senior role for me with the Mental Health Commission in Perth. We needed every advantage we could get. We were in battle mode.
Battle mode means fighting for survival. It means figuring out who you are after your life has imploded around you. Figuring out how to love each other in the midst of all the stress and the worry. Making sure the kids see you with a smile on your face because they’ve already paid a price they shouldn’t have had to pay, dammit, dragged 9,000 miles from a sprawling, loving, extended family.
We had forgotten how to do anything but work, as…
