Another Unconventional Step in an Unconventional Career Path

More than a year ago, I wrote an essay titled "Writing Is Trauma, Writing Is Healing: Unlearning the painful parts to recover the joy." In it, I described "taking a very long break. Deleting my LinkedIn profile. Starting over in a totally new job that doesn’t require my brain."

I almost did delete my LinkedIn profile. At the eleventh hour I pulled back, rescuing it from the pit. But I didn't post there for months, and not out of embarrassment for the new, non-writing job I did eventually end up taking. It was because after taking that job, I now had no idea how to describe my very nonlinear career.

I did, you see, end up taking a big step back from writing – a career break that required me to start to identify and define myself in ways other than a role I thought I was destined to play. This break helped me achieve balance by slotting writing back into a place it occupied within my life, rather than making it my entire life.

But it was a whole uncomfortably drawn-out process. I had to lose my identity, over and over and over again, before I could finally relinquish the idea of "identity" as anything more than an illusion and finally learn, simply, to live life.

LinkedIn wasn't built for posting about your trauma recovery

At the end of 2024 I was just wrapping up a project I'd started to call my "magnum opus": a five-part essay series focusing on my experiences as an abuse survivor and how I thought they fit into a larger social framework that enables abuse.

I published the whole thing on this site on January 31st.

Then I quit.

I told everyone I'd be okay if I never wrote a single thing again. I went "all in" on my new civil service job. I relished in the quiet weekend mornings spent going about my checklist of tasks, in solidarity with all the other worker bees in our city.

You see, I'd learned, as I wrote, "to write to prove I could think at an intellectual level far above my years." With that as my expectation, in every new piece I found myself experiencing existential anxiety over other people's judgments.

The brilliant Ayandastood refers to this anxiety as "the fear of being seen." Chronically online people can be judgmental; harsh, relentlessly unforgiving, cruel, with even the best of intentions.

Conditioned as I was to be sensitive to others' opinions and whims, I was terrified of setting a foot wrong. What, I asked myself in my journal, would I write if I truly didn't care what others thought?

Because at the same time that I couldn't bring myself to believe no one was paying attention, it also seemed that no one actually was. I just knew that if I wrote the wrong thing, someone would pounce.

Figuring out how to avoid that outcome, I literally wrote myself in circles, trying so hard to think of every possible angle so I would sound smart enough.

Spot the trauma response(s), folks. As I wrote: "I was still trying to prove my intelligence, intellectual gymnastics and all."

How I learned to stop posturing...

As I went about my worker-bee business, my brain relaxed, and with it, the rest of my nervous system. For the first time in maybe my entire life, I could just be... and draw a steady paycheck while doing it.

And then a funny thing happened. I can't say I was exactly surprised. If anything, while I was waiting for the "big" breakthrough, the "aha!" eureka moment where everything would finally fall into place and I'd "get it" – grousing the whole time about how "it" hadn't happened yet and I had to (still) be doing something wrong – the breakthrough was breaking through.

Humans are oriented to grow, wired to learn. Around the time I was finishing the "magnum opus" series (feeling desperate to be done with it already and yet wanting to do it proper justice as possibly the last thing I'd ever write again) I was fulfilling a few new-job requirements: FEMA independent study courses.

My new job wanted me to understand the fundamentals of the incident command system, the National Incident Management System (NIMS), and how the two functioned in a public-works context.

As the kids say these days, I ate and left no crumbs. In fact, reconnecting with concepts I'd started to explore many, many years ago, I felt in a lot of ways as if I was coming home. Or, at least, returning to some deeply buried version of myself that had never had a chance to become fully realized.

The deeper I waded, the more those old synapses fired, the more I wanted to contextualize what I was learning with experience I'd already lived and felt.

You know... through writing.

I found myself wanting to bring my AuDHD perspective to FEMA's training material. To write about situations I'd encountered, along with some of the moral and ethical complexities they presented – yes, even in a job that doesn't use as much of my brain, which was part of the point.

... and love my own process

At the same time, though, I continued to find that "the more I experience, the less I want to write about it." The job had successfully gotten me out of my head. For the first time in a long time, I was participating in my community, around other people, living life.

My experiences weren't distracting me from writing; instead I felt refreshed, part of something instead of apart from it.

Even when people higher up the unspoken American caste system sneered at me. Even when I felt put back in my place by managers and coworkers. Even when my new supervisor triggered my old "stuff."

So I didn't pressure myself to write, not the way I used to. Instead, I journaled. I leaned into caring for my home. I reconnected with my love for jazz. I let my mind wander.

That process helped me see that writing is, words are, still a crucial part of the way I process the world. Thoughts structured as phrases come naturally to me when I'm walking or doing the dishes or showering. My brain doesn't come up with drawings or sculpture or dressmaking. Sometimes I take good photographs or plant things that grow well, but those aren't as natural to me as breathing.

Not the way writing is.

You know the rest. I came back to this site and started posting here more regularly. I enrolled in graduate school and plan to start working towards my Master of Science degree in Trauma-Informed Emergency Management this month.

I have often thought that I took my "survival job" in order to recalibrate and rebalance the extreme amount of effort I was making for very little reward; something I was long ago conditioned, and then continuously reconditioned, to do.

In taking several giant steps back from everything I thought made me "me," though, I learned how to observe and separate my experiences from the well-worn stories I was telling myself; to take apart the stories and discard what no longer works and reassemble what's left, not into new stories per se – and certainly not a new "self" – but rather, into underpinnings for new experiences of my choosing that support my growth.

I think this is what healing looks like.

Onward and incrementally upward

Yet we don’t live in a world that supports the healing process we’re continually encouraged to trust. This world demands we prove our worthiness over and over, sacrificing tired minds and bodies to social expectations, economic realities, and the expectations around those realities.

When we do choose to follow our hearts, it often comes at considerable cost. Over the past three years, I've lost my livelihood, my income, friends, even my sense of self... along with all the baggage that came with them, that I never even questioned because I thought it was supposed to be normal.

As it turned out, losing all those things and people finally helped me find safety in the present moment, not because it's inherently safe, but because I can count on it to change. I don't have to like all the uncertainty, I've learned, as long as I can accept it – and to make room for potentially great things to happen.

I see 2025 as the culmination of this process. Even though it was another challenging year and I'm still not where I want to be, in many ways I am better off now than I was this time last year, and certainly than I was this time in each of the last five years.

However incremental, this generally upward trajectory gives me hope. I'm too AuDHD to expect that I'll ever find conventionally defined success, too stubborn to want to at this point, and too old to have the energy to keep doing what I've been doing.

In short: I've been defying convention my whole life. Last year I learned to stop shaming myself for it. This year I'm looking to see where embracing defiance can take me.