The Quiet Job
Not to be confused with The Quiet Place!
Also? Do not neglect the quiet job that doesn’t come home with you.
That line comes from a recent post on Alexander Chee’s The Querent1 as part of a larger, longer post on building a life and career as a writer. It’s a pebble in a post full of big thought rocks, but it’s the one that rippled out to me.
Last November, I started a quiet job or side hustle or whatever you want to call it at a outdoor lifestyle store. It’s funny to call it a “quiet” job because my work there is very customer-facing. I’m definitely not audibly quiet — I’m always talking to someone, making jokes on the radio, and generally bustling around.
But it’s quiet in the sense that my brain is calmer because of it.
When I’m at the store, I do what I do. I help make sales, keep things organized and looking spiffy (oh the sunglasses section, my nemesis), I connect with guests, I hope I bring light to peoples’ day with my sense of humor.
It’s fun and rewarding. But when I clock out, I walk through the employee door and leave it behind2 until the next time I walk back inside. I’m done for the day, another concept I’ve been practicing thanks to a post from Oliver Berkman’s The Imperfectionist.
Being at the store is a constant lesson in separating my self-worth from my work and external recognition, something I’ve been terrible about for the past 24 years. Am I a better human because I sold X number of cookbooks or write stories for Such-and-Such Prestigious Website? Is my life less meaningful because I never attempted to win a James Beard Award?
At the store, all I have to do is show up and no one cares about my backstory or my career or anything. (I mean, they care, my coworkers are all very nice, and we have a great time together. But my performance is not riding on my food writer skills and expertise.)
It’s been so refreshing to not have every waking moment feel like I’m responsible for it all, and if I’m not pitching or networking or working on a project that brings in revenue, I’m failing as a human.
Having this job doesn’t make me less of a writer or artist or working creative. It’s just that now I can finally start to see my value as a person beyond the diminishing returns of the social media recognition treadmill or the Pinterest hits.
The quiet job gives me breathing room to put all that aside and appreciate my existence without definition. To give myself an out from the constant pressure to produce and promote, and instead stop to consider what I might enjoy doing differently. And sit back and see what might come next.
H/T to
for shouting this out in a Substack note, otherwise I never would have seen it!OK, I will cop to having a weird dream recently about a sleeping bag return that I was worried I didn’t check thoroughly enough. And I could tell you so many stories about the lies people tell when trying to make returns.
I loved this and love you. And, I feel like I'm especially glad to hear you are putting yourself and peace first.
Love this!