Enter the Dragon

On quitting the job

A few years ago, a colleague asked what I would do if ‘my flourishing and fulfilment were essential to the world’. Not ‘what’s your dream job’ – a question I’d never really been able to answer, besides articulating a vague desire to do something a bit more creative. This question upending my thinking. Up until this point, I had been asking what was missing in the world, and trying to move towards fixing that with my career – and so, with my life.

On paper, everything looked just great. Working as a Political Attachée at the British Embassy in Paris certainly impresses certain types of people at dinner parties. There really were champagne soirées, balls for the Queen’s birthday and Ferrero Rocher.

I was also lucky to have kind, intelligent colleagues and, I am willing to bet, one of the world’s most beautiful, decadent offices. But no amount of free-nippled cherubs gazing down from the ceiling and outrageous gold-leaf panelling could quieten the soft unease in the bottom of my belly.

Me (in the mirror) in my golden office

Ignoring this internal chafing was easy enough. Like so many of my peers, my evenings and weekends were crammed with concerts, mini-breaks, galleries, booze, dancing, working out. Hobbies and friendships grew like weeds in the tiny cracks of my free time. My calendar, and therefore my life, was full. Overflowing.

But flourishing?   

The chafing grew into a writhing, a dragon-monster in my body. He woke me up at 5am to whisper “is this it?” in my ear. Tightened my shoulders, gave me back pain. Finally, during the pandemic, I hit rock bottom.

After some time scraping the bottom of the barrel, I quit, with no real plan except to discover what I really want to do with my life. To go into the unknown, and face the dragon.

Over the past eighteen months, I have realised I have been asking the wrong questions. It’s not so much what do I want to do, but how do I want to be in this life. To embrace the art of what John Keats called negative capability: to be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.

I’ve started to be less concerned with how I can shape myself into a job that will serve the world, and more with how I can lean into becoming fully alive. The world is surely in need of more people who are truly their authentic, joyous selves, rather than exhausted and burntout while trying to save it.

By letting curiosity be my guide, I have started to find fragments of an answer to my colleague’s question. I enrolled in jazz school in Paris and then dropped out after a year. I’ve done breathwork, yoga, psilocybin retreats, microdosing, and researched zen, neuroscience and psychology. I still have absolutely no idea what I am doing, but that feels far less scary now.

To paraphrase Joan Didion, I’m writing to know what I think. But also to know who I am, and to share some of the things I’ve learnt so far. Before I quit my job I spent many hours trawling blogs, and found reading other people’s stories heartening and useful. I hope to pass that forward in whatever small way I can.

And now I can also say I’m proud to have slayed perhaps my biggest dragon so far - which was to get started.