How I quit my job

Lees dit in het Nederlands

After eight years of study plus eight more of working  in order to be a landscape architect, I suddenly wasn’t sure about anything anymore. Since I was sixteen I went in a certain direction and after that I didn’t really stop and think about if this was what I wanted to do with my life. Every step that I took felt like the obvious thing to do.

Crawling back up

All of a sudden, in the winter of 2015/2016, I  lost everything that I thought I had always wanted. I had a short period in 2015 where I felt like I finally found what I was looking for. How wrong could I have been? Only a few months later everything was gone. So the start of 2016 was also the start of my new life. I had therapy, moved to a new place and found a new job. I was crawling up again. After working for a few months in this job they fired me…. Again.

I didn’t mind, because this job wasn’t my life, like my previous job was. At that point I came up with the brilliant idea of me starting back at the basics. So I went back to gardening, as i have studied it during the first four years of college. My plan was start from the beginning and then move towards  my landscape architect job later on.

The sudden love for Kalymnos

Only three weeks in on the job I went to Kalymnos (Greece) for a climbing trip. I went there all by myself, and although I found many people online who were going to be there while I was visiting, I met most of them on the way there. Quickly I would exclaim that this was the best trip I’d ever made. Coming back home after the trip I felt lost, and all I could think of was on returning to Kalymnos.. I thought going back to work after such a great vacation would bring back my enthusiasm for the job. It was after all, the best trip ever, so of course I could have a little high from that. Why wouldn’t I feel happy doing what I had studied for so many years? It was after all my life. How wrong was I, misled by customs learned from young age, choose your direction and stay on that path.

Did I just decide to quit?

After a few weeks of working I only started to feel worse and worse. I really didn’t want to be there. The job was physically too demanding, and it was way too much for me. This was very hard is to admit to myself and to others. On the other hand there was no mental challenge for me in the job, so I was also bored. I kept telling myself “It will get better”. But it didn’t. So one monday morning, after havent been able to rest at all after a three day weekend, I thought “what if I just quit?”. It rolled around in my head all day. And by the end of the work day I pretty much made up my mind. And by the time I went to sleep I started a diary and I decided to really quit my job, for the first time in my working career. I went to sleep happy and relieved. This was the real start of my new life.