I did everything in my power to avoid a life of 9-5. To me it felt like a complacent, stale lifestyle that I’d get sucked into the cycle of, ride out until I blinked & suddenly I’m celebrating my 40th birthday alongside my husband, 3 kids, & neighbors, blowing out the singular candle on my cake that says “40” (because no one wants to put 40 candles on a cake) while everyone stares at me with a stupid smile on their face as if I shouldn’t be having a midlife crisis.
To be clear, I don’t think having 3 kids, working a 9-5, or even turning 40 (god forbid) is a bad thing, but the timeline of life has always unsettled me. Well, not 12 year-old me. She had 5 pinterest boards dedicated to wedding planning — to be 40, married, & have multiple kids would make her prouder than most anything else. But in the time between 12 year-old me & 23 year-old me, many thoughts have floated down the canals of my brain if you can believe it. You’ve seen the blog posts. It’s a swirl of influx up there. No shot a mentality could stay completely true, consistent, & in-tact 10 years later. So, here I am now, at 23 years-old, wanting nothing less than to settle down. This is the part of the movie where the girl (me) goes, “it’s not you (a beautiful, White Picket Fence lifestyle), it’s me”. Because, after all — it usually is.
Yet life decided to throw a fastball my way with obvious intentions to take a clean shot straight to my pride.
A 9-5.
No, you did not just have an anneurysm — you read that right. As fate & irony would have it, I now work a 9-5 job. Wack, I know. It’s been a disgustingly tough, chalky, gets-lodged-in-the-back-of-your-throat pill for me to swallow. Except not. Because, while the confines of my work may be the same as Dolly Parton’s old job, there’s bubbled up a sense of purpose in that dash between the two numbers. Who said that one quote that one time? Abraham Lincoln, I think… “it’s not about the 2 numbers on the tombstone, but the dash in between that counts.” Actually, I just looked it up to fact check myself, and it was not, in fact, Abraham Lincoln that said that. It was Stuart Scott & I just terribly botched his everlasting words. Lucky for me, Stuart’s quote is a hard-hitter, and no matter how poor of a paraphrasing job I do, the point still stands:
Time spent doing something in this life is valuable.
That’s become truer than ever with this job. It’s a 9-5. I can’t wear athleisure (booooooo). I say things like “looking forward to following up” & “due diligence” in emails. I sit at a desk. Every ounce of my being should reject this shindig.
But one day I was driving down I-190 & I saw a building. Then I was curious what was in the building. Then I went down a rabbit hole of research about the building. Then I thought the concept of one of the companies within the building was unique. Then I applied for a job at said company. Then I didn’t get the job, but I liked how the lady who rejected me emailed so I followed up. Then she emailed me back & invited me for a coffee. Then we hit it off. Then she got me an interview with a company they invest in. Then I sat down with the CEO. Then I had a gut feeling that I needed to work for him. Now he’s my boss. At my 9-5…
Life never fails to sucker punch me in the gut with the fact that: every time you peel back to even just one layer behind face value of something or someone, you discover there’s a deeper story & meaning there. Always. Every single time. It’s seriously getting obnoxious at this point, just how redundant this concept is & just how much it hasn’t gotten through my thick skull. I judged a book by its cover, and, as a result, life decided it was a comedian, handed me a Reverse Uno card, & said, “Here’s a 9-5. And even worse — you’ll like it.”
And I do.
I work for a vertical SaaS, outdoor recreation, startup company behind a computer screen for the majority of the day. And none of those words resonate with me in any capacity. Fishing? Been once. Vertical SaaS? What even is that. Computer screen? Put it in jail. Everything that’s not me seems to have found it’s way into one, amalgamation-of-a-job & somehow fell right into my lap.
Yet I love it… I love the challenge, grit, & commradery that comes with startup culture. I love the straight-shooting, dry humor of a fisherman. I love that I’m consistently pushed to learn something new — whether that be studying SLM models in AI, figuring out what waders are (still don’t fish, but they’re going on my Christmas list regardless), or learning how the heck to convert a Word document to a PDF. I love that my boss, as successful of a run in the startup world that he’s had, came out of retirement to start this company, because folks he knew & loved had a problem & he had the skillset to give them a solution. I love getting to swivel around in my spinny chair & ask my coworker what she had for breakfast. I love feeling stupid & clueless, so I can ask a dumb question & gain more knowledge as a result. I love it all. Well, maybe not it all. It definitely isn’t my favorite thing to answer emails & do my hair every day & stare at a screen & say things like “in regards”. All of that, very-much-so, still rubs me the wrong way. Yet I do it, because I’m eerily sure that I’m supposed to be here, working with the people I am, with the boss I have, learning the things I do. Maybe not forever. Probably, most likely not. Yet where I am now really matters & will trickle into the rest of my days in a million, unforeseen, unimaginable ways. And that excites me — so much so, that I may not even mind filling out that next spreadsheet.
So, I guess all of this to say:
9-5 — this is my informally formal & pretty darn public apology letter. I’m sorry for judging you from the outside. After all, you’re just a timetable. And the work, chit-chat, research, & learning I’ve gotten to do within your timetable in these past couple months is invaluable to me. So, thank you.