Grieving My Career

And also mourning. And also being really frustrated.

My art is feeling more fulfilling than anything I’m doing at work right now

I’m having a really hard time at work.

Not because the work itself is hard. I write my little press releases. I make talking points. I update a website. I sit through meetings. I answer emails. I send messages to reporters who mostly ignore me. I sit through more meetings. I run ads. I edit copy. I fix ads after Meta rejects them for whatever new reason they’ve declared this week. I circle back on even more emails. I file expense reports. I write blogs that only seven people will read. I fill out timesheets. I work with contractors. I attend (you guessed it!) more meetings.

When the House passed the budget bill on Thursday, I was on my last legs, crawling across the finish line. But in this work, there is no actual finish line. I heaved my aching body through the tape only to look up and see the tape had moved another mile down the road.

I cried. I was supposed to work a four-hour day on Thursday. I worked six, was online by 6am, and still didn’t finish my job. I got in trouble for not finishing.

It was my dream to work with environmental nonprofits. And a communications director position? Holy shit. When I was in graduate school, I was so eager to become a STORYTELLER. I was going to work with these *amazing* organizations and help them tell their impactful stories. I was going to talk to people, take photos, make art, travel, do field work, write, and really put stuff out there. That’s what I learned in grad school, at least.

And now that I’m in it, I can confidently tell you I don’t do any of that. No one does.

On my worst days, I am a professional email opener and meeting attendant. On my best days, they let me turn my big storytelling ideas into an Instagram post. I don’t travel to Alaska gathering stories from people on the ground. I don’t help design compelling campaigns and ways to move people along their engagement journey. I thank Congress via the toxic wasteland that is X for nine likes and a retweet from a staff member. I wait for five people to over-edit my compelling email marketing copy into a mush of beige porridge that we force the public to choke down.

I’m feeling a lot of grief for my career this week. Because it’s not that I don’t like this particular job or position or organization (that would be fine, I could just find a new job)—it’s that I don’t care for this work. Period. I don’t care for the corporatization of activism and creativity. I don’t care for the urgency culture to impress funders. I don’t care for Congress or politics or the melodrama of D.C. I don’t care for traditional media. I don’t care for the nonprofit industrial complex in which we all fight for scraps of funding from controlling, bloated oligarchs philanthropists. I don’t care for social media and the consumerist hellhole it has become, which nonprofits exalt as the pinnacle of “audience engagement.” I don’t care for digital activism. And I definitely don’t care for trust-fund-baby boards of directors who pop in and out of the work as it suits them and make inane demands of a team that is already drowning.

This career that I worked so hard for, which seemed so purposeful, is starting to look utterly meaningless. When I talk to my coworkers and friends in similar lines of work, they are all expressing the same feeling.

What I can’t tell is if this was always the case, or if digital media, algorithms, and AI have just absolutely obliterated any meaning or worth left in what should be morally substantial jobs. And if Gen X and Boomer leaders are completely fine with letting that happen.

At an all-staff meeting recently, when asked what’s keeping us motivated in these tough times, not a single staff member mentioned nature or their public lands—at an org whose mission is to protect nature and our public lands. And when I did mention the ability to get out on Colorado’s public lands, I saw some serious side-eye from leadership because that means after 5pm, over holidays, and on weekends, I am largely unreachable (one of the extremely beautiful things about our public lands).

So I turned the side-eye back around: They are missing the entire point of this work.

My only solutions to this insidious, systemic problem are to suggest the following to those in charge of effecting change:

• Go touch grass

• Get over yourself

• Calm the fuck down

• Stop asking about the LinkedIn strategy (no one cares)

• Stop suggesting “going viral” as a strategy

• Generally, stop assuming a social media post could in any way solve organizational, governmental, or political issues at any level whatsoever

• Quit it with the never-ending urgency as a means to self-inflate your own importance so that you never have to feel the painful reckoning that perhaps none of this is as meaningful or important as you once thought it was

• Celebrate that your team is unreachable and taking care of themselves

• Actually send your communications teams out to collect stories, art, media, etc., instead of hoping they’ll find something from behind their computer screens

It is heart-wrenching to admit that I can’t find fulfillment in my work right now. It is gutting to wonder if fulfilling work is disappearing entirely. This is true, raw grief. A very real response to loss.

I’ve been told the size of your grief (for anything: a person, pet, job, home, etc.) never gets smaller. You just slowly learn to grow around it. So I am growing around my grief while mourning for my career.

At the same time, there is fulfillment in other places. Like working on my book proposal. Painting. Playing with Tex. Watching the bunnies run around the living room. Riding my bike. Watching funny shows on Dropout. Loving the desert. Lifting heavy things at the gym.

I am turning the idea of my career over like compost, and wondering what I can grow in its wake.