You can take the girl out of corporate...
...but how long to take the corporate out of the girl?
Every so often over the past few months I detect a hint of an anxious dread.
This anxious part of me is constantly hovering at the periphery of my awareness, occasionally making itself known by coughing or wringing its hands or looking pointedly in my direction. It’s terribly afraid that this blessed time of almost exclusively doing whatever, whenever, I want is surely going to come to an end – that this isn’t ‘real life’.
It needs to remind me of that intermittently so that I make the most of this precious time that will inevitably come to an end. It’s a feeling, as Dylan Moran quipped once, that at any moment the cage is about to come down (filled with Japanese fighting spiders, or the corporate equivalent).
This part of me is stuck believing that I’m really still a full time employee, and this is just a holiday, a temporary reprieve from the drudgery and monotony of corporate life that I must return to as I always did and always have.
Then there’s the part of me that is recurrently surprised that I’m being ‘allowed’ to do this; to work for myself, by myself, in this way, with so much control over what and where and how I earn money. So much unfettered freedom and potential – well that can’t be right! With whose permission??
I’m like Kevin Mcallister in Home Alone, waiting for his parents to come out and scold him for eating ice cream for dinner and watching violent films. Surely someone at some point is going to step in and tell me what to do?! As the days without parental supervision drawn on, the realisation is dawning for both Kevin and I that maybe we’re going to have to be the adult in this situation.
At some point I need to wholly accept that no one is coming to implement rule and order – that the buck in fact does stop with me and that is what I wanted. I chose this choice. This is what I was craving for years and years. And as bewildering and intimidating as bearing the full responsibility for my livelihood is, it needs to be fully embraced; failure i.e. going back, is not an option.
It reminds me of when I moved to London ten years ago, securing a full time contract at Thomson Reuters within a few months – ostensibly a real, grown-up job – and ultimately having my role sponsored and my visa renewed (three times), and yet for years and years I felt like I was on an extended working holiday. That I had escaped the real world and I was living in a kind of fever dream, where anything was possible, and the answer was always ‘yes’.
Slowly, slowly, I began to accept that it was really my life. That I didn’t ‘have’ to go back (to Australia) if I didn’t want to, that as long as I stuck it out I would make it to permanently settled status and win my freedom (the trials of which are certainly a tale for another time).
I don’t know how much success, or money, or proving to myself needs to happen before I feel comfortable that this is my reality now. I suspect I need to build this within myself the old fashioned way: brick by brick, moment by moment, a steady beat of self-assurance.
Slowly, slowly, the realisation that I have left the corporate world will sink in, gradually filtering down to the farthest depths of my psyche, until it is fully absorbed, and all parts of me can breathe a sigh of relief, relaxed in the knowledge that we are not going back.