Early Retirement

“Whoever you were, there was a chance that you would end up wanting to run away from a job you had once believed in, that you would stray from the path you were on.” 

There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura

I grew up without much of a clear representation of what a 9-to-5 type job looked like. Half of my family, including my own father, were academics, a profession that dictates its own schedule entirely, and that I understood to be more encompassing than a regular job from which you could go home at the end of the day. In contrast, my mother was a stay-at-home parent. 

The concept of a job for a job’s sake was foreign to me, even as my older brothers moved into the workplace. Either, they were doing things with computers that made no sense to me, and therefore lacked any visual representation to my mind, or they were following creative pursuits that felt more in tandem with the academic lifestyle as I understood it.

All this to say, as much I had never intended to end up in the film industry, when I did, it was a comprehensible path to me. The work was inconsistent and poorly paid, and often required me to work obscene hours. I didn’t bat an eyelid. It was exactly what I had seen academia to be. Hardly unusual.

For a time, I felt immensely privileged to be able to do a job that I cared about. I touted it as a badge of honour that I couldn’t possibly cope in a job for which I wasn’t passionate. I’m sure I’ve even written about it on this very platform. I remember being so unsettled during the first waves of the lockdown, creating projects and tasks for myself just so I had some purpose. I had no idea how to just be.

It’s something I’m still learning now.

But in the years following the pandemic, my career took quite a steep upward trajectory. I graduated out of lower-level administrative roles into positions that required more from me – and I loved it. I was terrified to start, certainly, but I thrived in an environment that pushed me to find creative solutions and came to love managing staff and having my own team. 

Alongside my career to date, I’d also always been writing – for a time, I was knocking out roughly one book a year, including the several intensive months of pitching novels to agents to no avail. But my calendar year always revolved around the next film festival, all of my energy and time powering towards ten days in the early autumn. 

The festival would end, I would take a week off, and I would invariably get very, very ill. Tonsillitis, usually, or some form thereof. I’d spend a few days in bed with an array of hot liquids and a cocktail of medicines and then pick myself back up and return to the office.

It would take me several years to realise that while I was allowing myself time to recover from my physical ailments, I was still quite unwell – mentally. It can take a long time to fully comprehend the toll that something has had on you. Ever so slowly, I started to realise that a dream job came with consequences. That passion couldn’t pay my rent. That while friends were getting into long-term relationships, saving for house deposits, and the like, I was barely making enough to make ends meet, with little to no time or energy left to consider bringing someone else into my life beyond the small social circle I already struggled to maintain. 

I think back on how willingly my friends laughed off the fact that there was a month of the year in which they were unlikely to see or hear from me. I wish they had shaken me then, and told me it wasn’t normal – but I can’t blame them. I wouldn’t have listened.

I remember an evening in late August in 2023. I had just turned off my laptop for the night, well past standard “working hours”. I had barely written a thing in months; it wasn’t just my energy that was spent on my job, but my creative skills, relentlessly used to solve the next problem and the next.

“I’m not doing this again,” I said. My manager laughed. She’d heard that before. “No, seriously. This is the last time.” She still didn’t believe me. It would, in fact, be the last time I worked a film festival. 

On that side of the Atlantic, anyway.

I’d concentrated so much of my burnout around that one festival that I didn’t think much of accepting an offer to do another after my move back to Europe. It didn’t take long there to realise the problem wasn’t the location – it was the industry. An industry that, across its many facets, just loves to suck every ounce of passion from its workers and give beans in return, while the stacks of gold remain with a prized few at the top of the beanstalk.

So, I took early retirement from my decade-long career. I was tired of having my passion, my enthusiasm for my work, exploited for others to profit. Which leaves me here: in Rome, at time of writing, without a job to my name. When people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a writer.

And for this year, that is all I am. A writer, and a traveller. I’ve taken the savings that I have not spent on a wedding or a house, and set them to see me through this year. One year to see if creativity can sell for my own benefit. One year to actually dedicate time, energy, and my creative braincells to my own endeavours.

And it might work. Or, it might not. Unfortunately, there remains an element of luck in all creative pursuits and I may well find in a year’s time that I have not sold a single project and have made it no further. In which case, it’ll finally be time to set aside the creative pursuits in favour of getting a “dumb job” – a 9-to-5 that is that and only that. A job to earn a living so I can otherwise enjoy the rest of my life.

It is also my year to recover. To try and somehow undo or write over the burnout that has reconfigured my brain. To try and find both a place and a life that brings me contentment. Happiness, as it turns out, is a fleeting emotion. All I want is to be content.

So, allow me a year if you will, dear friends and readers. For in a year’s time, I might have finally found the opportunity I’ve been working towards for so many years. Or, I might just have some great stories for my grandchildren.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade, it’s that life is too short not to even try.