I Quit My Editing Job, Pt. 1
The spiral road of career discernment.
If you had told me in January that this would be the year I’d walk away from my freelance editing work, I would’ve been surprised but not shocked. A little sad but not heartbroken. Secretly relieved.
I’ve run a freelance editing business for almost my entire adult life, since the year I got married and graduated from college. It was my dream job. I would get paid to read books! And I could work from home—a novelty in 2012.
But despite all the good, there was one question occupying my brain during the silent retreat I attended a few months ago: Is it time to stop editing?
This question had been prickling at me since 2018. Although I didn’t have the vocabulary to name it “discernment” at the time, I knew that this was more than just a logical, pro/con list kind of decision.
The process of discernment for me begins with a restlessness of heart. There will be a sense of unease that I can’t shake, the looming feeling that something isn’t quite right.1 I will try to ignore it, and it will nag at me until I face it and name it. The more I try to stay away, the more it will appear—in the books I’m reading, in the social media posts I see, in conversations with friends.
You can’t outrun the Spirit when God has something to say to you. I’ve been dancing with this discernment question for six years. This summer, the time finally came for me to make a decision.
Freelance editing was a dream job that was, for me, the means to a different dream: being able to stay home with the kids I knew I wanted and have a career. I pictured myself sitting at a desk while rain pattered against the window, tightening sentences and moving commas around while a baby napped peacefully beside me. I was going to be part of the process that brings books to life and I wouldn’t have to sacrifice time with my future kids. I could be a stay-at-home-mom and bring in some income to afford more wiggle room in our budget.
Friends, I am an only child. I’d spent very little time with young kids before I had my own. I had not the slightest inkling that raising a child is already a full-time job. I had no idea that the basic premise of my dream career was entirely delusional. The girlboss culture I had bought into was only too happy to affirm that my dream was attainable with enough hard work. I truly believed that I could have it all.
Enter: three kids in four years.
The problem with me is that even when reality looks different from the romanticized fantasy in my head, I cling to the daydream for far longer than I should. I closed my eyes and sang “la-la-la-la I can’t hear you” for years after learning what my chosen career would actually entail.
Sure, I could work with my kids at home, but I’m not getting a paid maternity leave, so better jump back into work three weeks postpartum. Yes, the “when to work” part of editing is flexible, but the “deadline” part is not—and no, babies don’t always nap on a schedule, no matter what the sleep trainers may say. Any sort of wrench in my schedule—sick kid, clingy baby, sheer exhaustion from being pregnant—would result in my needing to work either very early or very late to get anything done.
Of course, all of those things are normal. But those normal realities of life with kids were causing serious issues with this career I’d envisioned.
Did I get smart and recognize that freelance editing wasn’t working out after all? Nope.
By 2018 when that nagging of the Spirit first started, I recognized that I was drowning, but I didn’t see a life preserver anywhere. We weren’t in a position for me to give up my income entirely. There were no other job options that would allow me to work as much as I did without child care.2 I was convinced that I just had to make some adjustments and things would get better.
Goodness, did I try to make them better. I read every productivity and parenting book I could get my hands on, convinced that either I or my kids needed to change and then everything would improve. One of those books turned out to be less about getting things done in your career and more about vocation.
In Visions of Vocation, Steven Garber challenges his readers with this question: “Knowing what you know about yourself and about the world, what are you going to do?”3
Garber meant this question from a broader, more global and systemic perspective. But the Spirit grabbed onto that question and made it ring through my consciousness day in and day out.
Knowing what I know . . . how will I respond to my kids when one of them needs me while I’m working?
Knowing what I know . . . how will I handle the fact that my best-paying client is also asking me to work on pieces that go against my values?
Knowing what I know . . . how can I think more broadly about how to treat my neighbor when I’m impatient and short-tempered with my own family?
God spoke to me through that book, and for the first time, I listened. I dropped the client whose work interfered with my values. It had a significant financial impact, but it also felt amazing. It was my first step toward a vocation and away from my freelancing work.
From the Latin vocare, meaning to call, vocation is more than just a career. Parenting is a vocation, as is marriage or joining a monastic order or the priesthood. Vocation can be your paying job, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s less about the actual work you do and more about the spirit and gifts you bring to that work and to your ordinary life. You can have a calling to teach without actually being a teacher, and you can have a vocation of preaching without going to seminary and standing at a pulpit every Sunday.
The more I learned about vocation, the less satisfied I was with my daily life. It was becoming more and more obvious that editing was not my vocation and that parenting was.
But parenting and editing, at least with the approach I’d taken, were beginning to feel incompatible.
In the early days of parenthood, I had thought that it would get easier to work with kids at home once they got older. By the time I’d had Baby #4, my oldest had turned seven. I assumed I would be on the edge of a new phase of parenting that would make editing easier. That’s how I continued getting away with shoving my career discernment off to the side. I told myself that each year things would only get easier.
But as kids get older, they need you less physically and more emotionally. I hadn’t imagined the flicker of hurt that would cross my children’s faces when they wanted to show me something and I wasn’t able to focus on them because I was focusing on work. Or that several of my children are wired differently, meaning they seem to need even more of my time as they grow, not less.
No one was being neglected, but I didn’t have the time or energy to tend to my kids’ emotional needs the way they deserved. I tied myself into knots trying to find a solution. Was it the ever-elusive child care? Was it better parenting skills? Had we simply had more kids than we could handle? The answer seems obvious now. But—and this is deeply embarrassing to admit—three years ago, I was convinced that the vocation that wasn’t working was parenting, not editing.
One test for if a particular role, ministry, or position is for you is to look at the fruits of that work. How do you feel while engaging in this work? What are the outcomes for yourself and others?
Seen through that lens, editing was a tree full of rotten fruit. Not only was it unfulfilling in its own right, it was poisoning the rest of my family life. By this point in 2021, I was engaged in regular spiritual direction, which had led me to apply for grad school to train as a spiritual director myself. It was my next step in the right direction.
Yet for as unsustainable as my life was, I still didn’t bite the bullet and make the change that I really needed to. I could make the argument that for those first few years, I was wrestling with God and taking my time in discernment. In 2022, I had begun classes in spiritual direction. I had only added to my workload, making everything worse.
Still, I clung to my ideal of editing for two more years, long past when I had discerned that it was time to make a change. More on why coming soon in part two.
Feel free to share your own story of career/vocation discernment by leaving a comment or hitting reply!
In Ignatian terms, this nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right could be one form of desolation. Desolation isn’t always bad, but it is something to notice, just as the peace of consolation is something to pay attention to.
Yes, working without child care was the root of the whole problem. But by this point, child care was both unaffordable and difficult to find, and my income was no longer just extra but necessary. We had painted ourselves into a corner.
Steven Garber, Visions of Vocation, 51.
Looking forward to part 2!