It's OK.

Permission Granted: messy transitions, lateness, and taking breaks

Quitting Corp's purpose, dear reader, is to help you design a work life you love. It turns out that getting from here to there is messy. In my effort to do just that, I find myself and this newsletter meandering a bit.

Let me raise the curtains and show you some of this transition's behind-the-scenes messiness. I hope it helps if you ever find yourself in the same place.

On Thinking

We just left Tilghman Island on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Three miles long and one mile wide, it's a mesmerizing place of quiet and beauty that transforms every time the wind, sunlight, and cloud coverage changes. It felt like being alone on a boat in the middle of nowhere. Surrounded by the Bay, you can watch the sun rise and set over the water from the same place.

Entranced, I had time to think. I needed it.

At work and in regular big city life, we are constantly context-switching, completing errands, working towards deadlines, and delivering on others' expectations of us. As we sprint from one thing to the next, so do our thoughts.

In Tilghman Island, where there is no shopping and only occasional cell service, thinking rises to the top and becomes a marathon. As soon as you land on an idea, another avenue opens, and you fall in deeper. You notice how digging out a coherent idea takes more mental exertion.

A meta-analysis published last year proved what you already knew: there is a strong relationship between mental effort and negative feelings. Generally, people don't like thinking. We prefer the "law of less work" or "law of minimum effort."

But marathon thinking is exhilarating when it leads to solving a difficult problem, coming up with a totally new, creative idea, or gaining an insight so new that it wows you. It's an indispensable and non-negotiable part of the work-life I want to design for myself.

I haven't gotten there. Instead, as I write and publish a weekly QC post and work on Writers Studio assignments, I do more of what I did when working at Google: one problem solved leads to another problem to solve.

It's not what I want to continue doing. The work-life I imagine loving is full-time writing, but I don't want to be a writer who is sprinting from one assignment to the next. My ambition as a writer is to be a marathoner.

On Transitions

In our lovely Tilghman house (thank you, MQ!), my chosen "writing room" looks out of three adjacent windows with multiple panes. Their grid structure, how each pane organizes and orders the view, and the boundaries it imposes on what I see/perceive have me thinking of and searching for a better way to structure my next steps toward that work life.

When I left the structured environment of corporate life to start writing, I fell into some of the same patterns I'd grown used to in my corporate role. My work week became a check-off list: One, write QC essay, post every Thursday. Two, listen to and follow all the Substack growth gurus. Three, post Substack notes daily. Four, continuously improve writing by attending Writers Studio. Five, be extremely clever about it all.

The panes in my temporary writing room windows tell me to stop performing. Staring through each distinct square, one at a time, I can finally see different parts of the view ahead and a world of possibilities I have not yet fully explored as part of this transition.

My husband, Renard, looked at the same windows and said, WTF? Well, each person finds order and meaning where it works for them. As long as we ask hard questions of ourselves, take the time to find answers that are genuinely ours, and give ourselves permission to move through our transitions in non-linear ways, I think we can be ok.

On writing, and this Substack newsletter

As I prepare to post this essay, the total number of subscriptions to Quitting Corp is hovering around 575. Each week, when I post, I gain a few more people than I lose. Writers who've been at it much longer tell me to keep at it. As long as you are writing from the heart, you'll find your tribe. So I will continue posting here as I have from the start: writing from deep within my heart.

Tilghman Island left me surer than ever: it's time to start on a more extended project that marries research, imagination, and my interest in weaving written words into a meaningful pattern. I have a project in mind about the lives of my great-grandparents Rosa and Bernhard Sekles and what they lost as they fled Germany before WWII.

We'll see if I can.

[K]Now You: Trade the sprints for a marathon

The exploration of my messy transition through this Substack is a live experiment, a real-time exploration into designing a work-life I love.

I wish I could tell you how it ends before I arrive at the finish line and have ready-made transition formulas and frameworks neatly stacked on a shelf. The best I can offer are tiny chapters in this journey.

If you are constantly engaged in sprints, try a thinking marathon instead, around our own questions, stories, and the permission that personal transitions demand.

The next stop on our nomadic existence is London, where I'll spend time with my new grandson. I can't think of a better reason to give your inbox a break from the QC while I sit on the floor to play with him.

I look forward to seeing you soon but (maybe) not next week.