Not Too Soon

K. can see the future.  When we were still in law school, she predicted that, once all my education was behind me and there was nothing but work ahead of me, my restless soul would start climbing the walls of its cage.  We laughed about this observation, but nobody said she was wrong.

Uncertainty I can handle.  When our job plans fell through just a few months before graduation, K. fretted for all of us, but I felt calm.  The decision of where to look for work was the result of much prayer and convincing inspiration, so I felt good about the destination even if I couldn't see the path.  Eventually, I lucked into a steady, unexciting job with good hours, good pay and good co-workers, and it seemed my earlier faith had been rewarded.

But the very steadiness of the job made K.'s prediction come true.  Grateful as I was to be able to eat breakfast and dinner with my family each day, the quiet, repetitious nature of the work began to make me feel dead inside--take the bus, draft transactional documents, bill nine hours of time, go home.  Based on what the more senior attorneys were doing, the future looked very much like a straight line, stretching into infinity.

With six figures of student loans and a thirty-year mortgage, I was locked into a job that was too adequate to leave, especially after the bottom fell out of the legal market.  Rationally, I understood that the despair of having a well-paying but unsatisfying job was the kind of first-world problem that not many would sympathize with, but that didn't make the despair any less real.  There were plenty of perfectly contented days, but then there would be long stretches of discouragement, depression and lethargy.  I began to worry that my inability to love my work would inevitably lead to a disastrous mistake.

Over a year ago, on Leap Day, I went into such a deep funk that I only managed to bill four hours before I decided to just give up and try again tomorrow.  Taking an early bus home, I did a lot of soul-searching and prayer, and finally arrived at this thought:  It's okay to leave this job.  Let me put that another way--I felt as if God himself was saying, "Don't worry, you've stuck with this job long enough.  You're free to go."  All the way home, my thoughts rushed and raced.  Back in my memory, my brain found this lyric from Throwing Muses and began to sing it, over and over: "It's not too soon he said/ It's not too soon at all/ You might as well be dead he said/ If you're afraid to fall."

My friend Steve put that song on the first mix-tape I ever got, but somehow in that moment the lyrics and my mood and the straight-ahead tempo of the song became a drumbeat in my head, pounding again and again that it was time to move on, and that was okay.  I came home singing and smiling, turned the song on full blast, and told K. what I was thinking.  She was on board.  A month later I told my bosses, and they were great.  Never mind that it's taken me until now to actually find the next job.  To me the big step was finally knowing, or maybe just admitting, that it was time to go.