So I had been at my last job for four years. Two years into it, I picked up two other jobs. My main job was really ideal (initially) and I was afforded a lot of freedom with a lot of perks. I would do four-day work weeks. The two other jobs were definitely a decent amount of work between the two, but the pay per unit time was pretty significant and so I kept with it. Something about once you’re moving at a certain pace, it’s easier to maintain that than it is to stop it and restart. I had originally thought I’d maybe do the two side-gigs for a year before backing off on one of them. Then before that full year Covid hit and I decided with the uncertainty in the world I’d just plow through for the time being, though Covid in particular made both of these fairly stressful in a number of ways. I felt like I could handle things and there really is a certain crazy power when you’re doing a ton of things and somehow managing to do it all, but felt like I was existing on the edge of my capacity and it required things to not peak in intensity with different jobs. But when they would all peak together it was a bit too much. In February I had a really good buddy from medical school where we both ended up in Utah when all was said and done (we were in school elsewhere). When we went into school together we both had our first kids that were each about a year old. We remained pretty good friends and ended up in the same place for rotations so we’d see each other often up until we graduated. They ended up with 5 kids, as did we, but the extent of us interacting was mostly texts, occasional phone calls, and largely following their updates on social media. So I hadn’t seen him for probably 8 years but we’d both been back in Utah for a little bit. In the midst of working, one day the thought popped into my mind that I should call him and have our families get together. I quickly dismissed it with how busy we were, and how busy they must be. Two days later I got the news that his oldest son died in a tragic accident the day after that thought popped in my head. I don’t say this in the sense that I blame myself, but to a degree believe in chaos theory, I believe that had I just picked up the phone to call him that day, that the whole sequence of events wouldn’t have even transpired. I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with death over the past 10 years or so (compared to how I was as a kid regarding it), and though we hadn’t really been around each other in so long, that death was so much more challenging than anyone much closer to us with the circumstances, the similarities in our families, and the unfortunate random chance.
Ultimately, this led me to finally making the decision to drop one of my jobs. I had told them I’d stay on until they could find someone to replace me but that they knew I’d transition out. Over the previous year, I also had been casually flirting with the idea of a specific change for my main job. I’m incredibly consistent to a fault and so I feel like I overresearch my options, but then when I commit I’m committed for sure, so the idea of changing jobs was pretty huge. There had been a number of things over the previous four years that was signaling that job (that had initially been ideal) was moving in the wrong direction and that I was definitely going to need to get out at some point but was not sure when that would be. I ended up making the change back in July/August and so far has gone really well. I ended one of my side jobs (actually the other one, and kept the one that I told them I was going to bail on — that’s a long story itself), and it’s been really good so far. It’s definitely been much less stress and headache and feel I can be much more present rather than always having some looking task, documentation, or paperwork hanging over my head that I have to squeeze in at all available moments. Thinking about this post, this sounds like more of a downer, but I’m glad I made the change. Eventually I’ll move down to just one job, and that will be the day. But that’s not today.