Leaving Your First Real Job

When the learning is over

Category: Early Adulthood

It doesn’t announce itself. There’s no dramatic incident, no explosive meeting. You’re sitting at your desk on a Tuesday and you realize: there’s nothing here you don’t already know how to do. The tasks that used to challenge you are now automatic. You could do them in your sleep. Sometimes you feel like you are doing them in your sleep. You remember your first week here. Everything was new. The coffee machine was intimidating. You didn’t know anyone’s name. You were learning twelve things before lunch. That person feels like someone else now.

The Guilt

How guilty you feel. They gave you your start. They took a chance on you when you had nothing on your resume but potential and punctuality. And now you’re thinking about leaving? The loyalty trap. This place made you who you are, professionally. Leaving feels like betrayal. Staying feels like stagnation. Both feelings are true. You thought your first real job would be the beginning of a story. Instead it might be the whole first chapter. Short chapters are still chapters. The fear that you’re being ungrateful. Wanting more feels like not appreciating what you have. But appreciation and ambition can coexist. They just don’t feel like they can.

The In-Between

You’re still showing up. Still doing the work. Still smiling in meetings. But there’s a distance now, a gap between your face and your feelings. You’re performing enthusiasm you don’t feel anymore. The performance is exhausting. Everyone else seems fine. Are they performing too? Or are you the only one who’s outgrown this? You look at the people who’ve been here for years and you wonder: Is that going to be me? Is this where stories go to end? You’re not being fair to them. But you’re not being fair to yourself either.

The Leaving

You’re not abandoning them. You’re graduating. This was supposed to be the beginning, not the end. You learned what you needed to learn. Now you need to learn something else somewhere else. The skills are yours. The confidence is yours. The competence is yours. They helped you build those things. But they’re yours now. You get to take them with you. You don’t owe them forever. You owe them gratitude. Those are different things. Gratitude doesn’t require staying. You can be grateful and gone.

Good Company

The Defining Decade — Meg Jay, 2012
Jay is a clinical psychologist who got tired of watching twentysomethings treat their most formative years as a waiting room. She writes about identity capital, the things you collect by doing, not by planning, and makes the case that your first real job isn’t a commitment. It’s a first draft. The book that gives you permission to treat a chapter like a chapter, even when everyone around you is acting like it’s the whole book.
The Devil Wears Prada — David Frankel, 2006
Andy gets the job a million girls would kill for. She learns everything. She gets good at it. She starts becoming someone she didn’t plan on being. Then she walks away. Frankel made a film about the exact moment when competence becomes complicity, when you realise that being good at something isn’t the same as wanting to keep doing it. The phone going into the fountain is the most satisfying resignation scene in cinema because it’s not angry. It’s just done.
Ctrl — SZA, 2017
SZA made her debut album about the gap between who you are and who you’re becoming, the uncertainty, the guilt, the wanting more while being afraid that wanting more makes you ungrateful. Every track holds two feelings at once: ready and terrified, done and loyal, gone and still standing at the door. It’s the sound of someone who knows it’s time to leave but keeps looking back at the building. The most honest album about outgrowing something you once loved.