I just passed a year at a job I often want to leave, and I already know that if they told me tomorrow I never had to come back, part of me would miss it. I finished a six-day stretch this week, and when I finally clocked out, my body felt like it had been let out of something it had been holding all week.
That relief is real and I am not going to pretend it isn't. Six days on your feet in a seafood department teaches you how much a body can take before it starts sending you the bill. But being glad it is over is not the whole story, and the part I keep chewing on is stranger than that. The same job that wears me down is part of what holds me together.
You are supposed to pick a side, love it or hate it, chase the passion or grind for the check. I have never found the side I was supposed to stand on.
For most of my working life I did my jobs the way you hold your breath underwater. I was there and I wasn't. My hands did the work while the rest of me was up the road, inside a book or a game I would rather have been building. I watched the clock like it owed me money, and every hour felt stolen out of my real life.
What nobody tells you about spending a shift somewhere else in your head is that the shift still happens anyway. You live it twice, once with your body and once with the argument running in your skull about how unfair it is that you are there. Two days of work folded into one, and only one of them ever shows up on the check. For a long time I was tired in a way the job alone could not explain, and most of it was just me fighting the whole shift long.
The work was still hard, my feet still hurt, the pay was still less than it was worth, and none of that was my attitude's doing. Fighting the day never created the hardship. It just made me pay for it twice.
I worked something else out by paying attention. While I am there, the wanting to leave gets loud, loud enough that I would swear I am miserable. Then I drive home, and by the time I am through my own door it has shrunk back to its real size. Not gone. Just smaller than it felt at the counter. The feeling is real, and it is also bigger than whatever it is pointing at.
So this week I clocked out with two days ahead of me and nothing owed to anybody, and two days is exactly right. I sleep. I slow all the way down. No alarm, no case to refill, nobody needing anything from me. My body takes the rest it has been asking for, and for two days that is enough.
I have learned what the extra days do to me, though. Give me three or four in a row and the rest starts to curdle. I get restless, thoughts doing laps, my head filling with every unfinished thing I have ever started, all of them talking at once. By the fourth day I am antsy in my own skin and, a little embarrassed to admit it, wanting the structure back. Not the money. The shape of it. Somewhere to put my hands and my hours.
That is a me thing, my own wiring. I am not about to tell somebody grinding through three jobs that they need more structure. That would be a cruel and stupid thing to say. I only know that for me, a life with nothing in it doesn't open into freedom, it closes into a different kind of stuck. I want work to sit at the right size. Big enough to give the week some bones, small enough that it leaves some of me for the rest of my life.
Once I stopped trying to be anywhere but where I was, the job started handing a few things back. Small things, the kind you would never put on a list of reasons to be grateful, because they sound like nothing out loud.
The dishes, for one. Washing dishes is the job they hand you when nothing else needs doing, the bottom of the ladder. From the outside it might be the least meaningful part of the day. From the inside, on the right afternoon, it is the quietest room I get. The water runs over my hands, and the trays and containers and knives come in dirty and go out clean. I put an audiobook in one ear, and for a little while nobody needs me to be anything but a guy moving wet trays. My hands stay busy, my head gets some room, something in my chest lets go a notch. Still on the clock, still getting something done, almost completely left alone. Some days that is the whole win.
The rest comes and goes. On a break I sit in my car and close my eyes for ten minutes, carts rattling past, until I remember I am a person and not a function. There is a real satisfaction in keeping the case full and staying ahead of what is selling. And every so often a coworker says something that lands, or a customer treats me like a person instead of a machine that talks, and for a while the shift feels less like a shift.
None of this makes the job good, because gratitude turns ugly the second you use it to talk yourself out of what you already know. I am grateful for the check and I think the check is too small. I am grateful for the structure and there are weeks it grinds me down to the boards. Both are true in the same shift, and I have stopped trying to make them shake hands. I don't notice these moments through some rosy filter. They are just honestly there, mixed in with the sore feet and the boredom and the wish to be somewhere else.
All of this works because my job is basically okay. Hard, underpaid, but not dangerous, nobody stealing my wages or sending my body somewhere it might not come back from. An audiobook in the dish pit does not fix a job that is breaking someone. Meaning does not make unfair pay fair. Some jobs earn every bit of the hate a person has for them, and the honest answer there is to leave, or to fight. How I hold my circumstances is one lever. It was never the only one.
Staying present at work never meant learning to settle for it. It didn't mean the pay was suddenly fine, or the exhaustion acceptable, or this counter the whole measure of what I am worth. It didn't mean shelving the writing and the books and calling that peace. It only meant I stopped walking out on myself, stopped leaving the guy who had to stand there and live the hours whether I showed up or not.
The goal was never to love every hour. It was to stop abandoning myself inside them.
And then I take it home, and the day doesn't just evaporate the way it used to. Something happened out there that I actually caught, and now I have somewhere to put it. I write it down, and half the time I don't know what a day meant until I have spent an hour at the keyboard arguing with it. It goes up on Substack, and once in a while it reaches somebody who writes back.
I won't dress that up. Most of what I put out there lands in a small room. Some pieces move, most barely twitch, and the algorithm never seems to care which ones I bled over. It makes me angry. I want it to reach more people and pay something someday, and I am done pretending an artist should be above wanting that. One comment does not always feel like enough, and I won't tell you it does.
But sometimes somebody answers. Someone I have never met says they felt the exact thing I was trying to name, and for a second the thing I carried out of that shift is not stuck inside me anymore. The reach is still small, and by the next morning I still want more of it. But it did the one thing I needed it to, which was land on somebody, even if only the one.
I used to think freedom meant getting out from under work completely. No shifts, no schedule, nobody expecting me. I still want plenty off this job. Better pay. Shorter stretches. More left in the tank for the work I actually choose. But I have stopped believing the whole thing gone would set me free. I know what I turn into with too much empty road ahead of me. It is a job. It pays for part of my life, and when I stay awake inside it, the hours stop being dead time and turn back into my life.
If you are reading this at the tail end of your own long stretch, feet aching, I am not going to tell you to go find the meaning in it. That is not mine to hand you, and plenty of days it isn't even there to find. The hours were going to pass whether I stood inside them or not, and a few of them I got back just by staying. I am still tired, and I still want more than this job gives me. But I caught my breath this week, enough to write it down, and if it reached you at the end of yours, then it made it across. That is the whole of what I have, and tonight it is holding.
From The Grey Zone
This is what I do with a shift once it is over. I take it home, sit with it, and turn it into something another person can read. There is more of it here. https://thegreyzone.xyz
Tip the Kitchen
Nothing here is a bill. If a line in this one made it across to you and you feel like leaving something on the counter, I will be glad, and if you do not, I am still glad you came and read it. https://ko-fi.com/mastergreygray
Take what's useful. Leave what isn't.