That Feeling of Leaving One Job, and Starting Another

Richard Lawson is starting his new job as an entertainment columnist for Vanity Fair today, and he wrote a lovely piece on his blog about joining the workforce after college, about his first job in New York City working in sales for Broadway shows, and about the role our jobs have in helping form a part of our identities. Here he is talking about leaving that sales job and moving onto something new:

It was such a giddy, thrilling, sad, scary little moment there in the elevator, me amazed and awed with the bittersweet recognition that I was leaving behind the role, the accepted obligation, that had brought me here. That I was saying to it, and myself, that I existed for more than one reason, that I could make choices, could be independent, sovereign in the life I’d decided to start living.

Work is important in that way, I guess. It can be, on its best and oddest days, a reminder that, if we’re lucky, we can have some control over our lives, our own little stories, that we can be willful and brave and self-possessed. I still wish, of course, that I could be lazy and shiftless, independently wealthy and obliged to no one’s clock but my own. But as a way of measuring time and experience, work is useful, alternately heartening and frustrating.

And isn’t that true.

Photo: David Orban

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