Six months before I quit my academic job, I led a conference session called “Quit Your Job.” It was a big deal I got to do this, in a few ways. I was presenting at the biggest international conference in my field, and that school year was an inflection point in my career. If things didn’t change, I knew I might have to, well, quit my job.

I was leading the session for myself first. I was seeking industry-agnostic wisdom, a fresh perspective to get me out of the ways I’d been thinking about my work and my worth. The shape of the thing isn’t the thing. A sand toy can stamp the shape of a crab or a sea star into the earth, but it doesn’t change the substance of the stuff.

If I was leaving, I wanted to at least take the time to make my own sense of things. It did not feel like I would be going out on my own terms; no, I felt like my hand had been forced.

All the same, my work was something I was proud to put my name on. Other jobs, I’d had to sneak my name onto the things I was proud of, literally. At the end of one job, I hid messages as acrostics in an Annual Report. In each article, the first letters of each sentence spelled out all sorts of things—my name, “banana,” “toilet,” “turnip,” whatever.

That place was mostly grant-funded, the kind of place where it was acceptable to sit in silence in a windowless meeting room for three hours on a conference call with Washington so the supervisor of our contract there could wax poetic on projects “it would be great if we could find a way to try,” even though our award didn’t provide enough time or money for them.

Aye, there’s the rub. These details about the work, the time, and the money sometimes don’t line up. I couldn’t even make my painstaking secret messages pay: they never published it. They just, didn’t put it out after I left. No Annual Report. Like 2012 hadn’t happened.

So I faced what those little jokes really were: a way to entertain myself on the way out the door of an hourly gig. An attempt to leave my mark in a place where other people’s names went on my work.

On the way out of another place, my boss led me to a shelf of gifts and merch. It was my last day, and she wanted to send me off with something. It was an internship at a fashion, beauty, and celebrity gossip website. I’d been hourly there too, and unpaid, but only for a few months.

I didn’t have a byline there either, but nobody did, so it made some sense. And I’d gotten interesting assignments and adventures. I got to go to a fashion show, and saw a screener of a movie.

I also got schooled. Once, in an attempt to be thorough, I referred to Bono as “U2’s Bono,” and my boss took me to task over how wildly unnecessary those first four characters were. I tried to laugh it off. Maybe I hoped it was a small point she was making, since she had started making it in front of the whole staff.

“Oh, I guess so!” I conceded. But that only made her dig in.

(“Well she’s right, you know,” my own mother said when I tried to vent to her about the scene.)

That job had the trappings of a Devil Wears Prada, but it wasn’t that. (The male department chair at the grant-funded place was more of a Miranda Priestly than any other boss I’ve had. Inquire within if you want the particulars.)

The not-Miranda boss picked out a beautiful bottle of perfume for me when I left.

“You’re not much of a girly-girl, are you, Caitie?” It wasn’t a question. (Again, I know how it sounds.) She gave me a once-over and pulled a package from the shelf.

“Here. This one,” she said. The perfume bottle was clear and but the inside was ocean blue. It was lovely. A light floral with sandalwood. The bottle was full size, and I still use it. She was right again. More than that, she had a sense of me that wasn’t wrong, and that was something. Who doesn’t want to feel known?

Years on, I think I wanted to know it mattered I’d been any of those places. Not just that I got something from them—the money or the experience or the byline—but that I’d changed the shape of the thing by my being there. That it would be possible to tell I’d been there. Is that the ego? Is it fear of death? What is this thing?

Before I quit my academic job, I knew it was time to leave, but it was more of a struggle than I’d anticipated. I’d been able to grow my position with such independence, under my own direction, that it was a reflection of me. I didn’t warp myself into the shape of the job; it was me-shaped by the end.

I didn’t know how to walk away from a me-shaped thing. That felt wrong.

We get attached to the ends of things—it’s just part of how brains work. But I’ve got time to tidy up the threads. It’s not over till it’s over.

---