I Quit My Day Job

I guess I’m a full-time writer now

Yesterday was my last day of school. After ten years as a high school teacher, I turned in my keys and laptop. For the first time, I won’t be returning in the fall.

One of the things that felt the weirdest was taking all my keys off my lanyard and handing them in.

Although I’ve known this change has been coming all year (for several years, actually), I haven’t fully had time to absorb it. I have a feeling it isn’t fully going to hit until the fall. Today, I’m just…doing what I always do? It’s kind of a normal day of writing, meeting with clients, and working on other writer/ book coach stuff.

My life has been tied to the ebbs and flows of a school year since I was five. I went straight from high school to college, and straight from college to teaching. Not being at school June, July, and August feels normal. September is when it will really hit that I’m not going back.

I’m a full-time writer now.

What does it mean to be a full-time writer?

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I first learned that was a job. Teaching was my fall back profession – something I could enjoy doing and get money and health insurance while I built my writing career. I entered the profession with the expectation that I would leave before having a full “career” – I just didn’t know when.

Several years into my teaching career, I started to realize I would be in it longer than I originally thought, and I was okay with that, actually. I loved my school. I loved my department. (Leaving them remains the hardest part of leaving this job.) I found that I even loved the job. The struggle was that I still also really wanted to write and was finding it difficult to both commit fully to my job as a teacher and still have the energy to develop as a writer.

Around this time, I also learned that most full time writers aren’t spending 40 hours a week writing their books. Many writers with careers I envied still had day jobs and had to spend significant parts of their work week marketing their books. I started to understand how rare it is to make a living purely off writing and that I was in all likelihood going to need some other kind of work to sustain me.

This is why I shifted away from teaching high school history towards being a developmental editor and book coach. Teaching history helped me become a better historian than being a history student had. Could teaching writing help me become a better writer? (As a matter of fact, yes.) If I was always going to need to rely on non-writing work to support myself, I wanted that work to also support my writing, not hinder it.

I taught full time for seven years while writing. Then, I taught part time for three years while writing and building my business as a book coach. After a decade, I have built a stable foundation, and if I ever want it to be anything more, I need more time to devote to building. If I want my writing and editing career to keep growing, it’s time to quit my day job.

So, I quit my day job.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

I loved my career as a high school teacher. I have no regrets about the ten years I spent in the classroom. If I hadn’t, I never would have met some of the most important people in my life. Teaching in a public school where I worked with students of all walks of life made me a better, more empathetic human. Being thrust into a super creative, challenging management job straight out of college gave me the skills I needed to run my business as a writer and book coach. I couldn’t be who I am today without the time I spent as a teacher – and I think this version of me is pretty awesome.

But I’m also really excited to see what I can accomplish now that I’m able to unleash my full energy on writing and coaching. Three years ago, I took a chance on a new business. Two years ago, I took a chance on a new book idea. Today, I have a growing list of writing clients I love working with. I have a book I’m super proud of and an agent who is helping me get it into the world. I’m also moving at the end of the summer! This is a time of big changes for me. I’m still in the midst of things and don’t have the context or hindsight to say what it all means or what will become of it.

But for now, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished and excited for the future.