RE: Why I am Returning To The 9-5

and why most people will hate their first job, but that shouldn't stop you from trying out a second or third

If everyone who disliked their first job, decided never to go into the field they trained in, where would the world be? This is the sentence my dad said to me that (kind of) changed everything.

At the start of the year, I left my job with nothing to go to. My thoughts surrounding this decision have swung from strong to stupid like a pendulum, the direction of the swing dictated by how everything else in my life was going. I left my job in February, and it is only now, in late September, that I am re-entering the 9-5 world. When I first left my job all I knew is that I couldn’t stay any longer. I couldn’t hold on. I had been holding on but I was starting to wonder what I was holding on for because here’s the thing, sometimes you need a sink or swim moment and I knew I was not able to swim if I was still sinking with the ship of a life I knew I didn’t want. And so I let go. And slowly over the past 7 months I have learnt to swim again.

The last seven months have taught me how scary losing yourself is, but have shown me that it is possible to find yourself again. You go back to basics, you remember what you like and what you don’t like, you do things that are totally different to what you were doing before and slowly you remember the version of yourself you once were, but everything is not as it was. I don’t think we can ever go back to the past versions of ourself, but I think we use those past versions of ourself to grow into something better.

When I left my job in February I had no idea what I wanted to go into, but I knew I had to find something making me happy. Then, the terrible awful job market that we are in hit me like a slap in the face. After 2 months of constant applications, cover letters, and selling myself to every job going, I had nothing. This is when the fear started to set in.

What if I didn’t find anything. I didn’t say it out loud too much, but I was spending the savings I had thought I would use for a house and nothing was coming. This wasn’t going to be the easier transition I thought it would be. I always said at the end of the second month, if I didn’t have my dream job, I would get any job. Then, whilst I had that job, I would hopefully work out my next move. Truthfully, I think 2.5 months of intensive job applications (every day for hours and hours), an Excel spreadsheet that I thought would show me my future job but actually just listed every failed application and a slight self-confidence crisis led to me needing an anything job. An anything job is a job you take that isn’t the forever job, but gives you the option to choose your forever job without having to jump into something you don’t really want. And so I began working at the café.

When I thought of my 2025 bingo card working on a till was not on there, but it was exactly what I needed to do to remind myself that a job is just a job. That a job does not have to be the be-all and end-all of everything you do. That a job allows you to support yourself, but should not be the crutch you lean your entire self-worth on. And so, working in a café, ended up being one of the smartest decisions I ever made. Slowly, I stopped feeling anxious about going to work. I stopped feeling anxious about things going wrong, about failing, about things out of my control. My job was just a job, and I had a life outside of it.

But now, I am leaving this job for something new. I am re-entering the 9-5 world, and I’m so incredibly excited. So many things will be new and different, but I know I’ll figure it out. I think we forget this. We forget that although things that are new and different can be scary, we have faced so many of them before and each time we have figured it out. We are so much more adaptable than we realise. We have more choice than we think.

So now I’m leaving the café life for something a bit different, a job that appeared out of nowhere, a job that has shown me a reserve list is not just something they say to make the let-down less hard. So if you are also in the thick of job hunting, I hope this reminds you that it’s absolutely fine to take any job whilst you choose your next move, and shows you that every path leads somewhere, we just might not know it when we start walking.

I have been told that life is split into thirds: a third we will love, a third we will hate, and a third we will think is okay. The more things we do, the more we will understand what we love and what we hate; the more we will guide our life to increase the good third and decrease the bad. Most people won’t like their first job, but don’t let that dislike stop you from trying somewhere else, from having a second job or a third job. It’s in those second or third jobs that we push for more of what we love. We stretch out the portion of our life that includes things we love, and we begin to curate a life that makes us really happy.

Love Bella 💌

Make sure you tune into tomorrow’s podcast on this same topic! Search You’ve Got Mail wherever you listen to your podcast 🎧