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…
