“I took a $50,000 pay cut. I don’t regret it.”

They offered this to all full-time employees — buyouts were a strategy they used when the budget was especially lean. My colleagues whispered that this was a terrible offer. The $25K would shrink to $18K after taxes. If you left without another job lined up, how many months of expenses would that cover?

I was secure at my job, and not unhappy. I had no other prospects.

But I didn’t even bother with the math. I took the offer.

It was a foolish financial decision — and I don’t regret it.

✦

I had worked at the college — first as a part-time professor and then as a full-time tenured one — since 2005, when I was 28 and fresh out of grad school. It was the first and only job I’d held that wasn’t food service.

In my twenties, I had a job baking cake layers for an upscale bakery. I punched in, looked at the orders, and spent the next ten hours moving between prep station, mixer, and oven. I cracked eggs, I whipped butter with sugar, I listened to the radio. It was a dream job and I would have done it for a lifetime if that had seemed like a viable option.

For the years that I was a full-time professor, I was also the primary caregiver to two children. They were (and are) autistic, but I didn’t know this in part because I was (and am) autistic, and all our little strangenesses and sensitivities seemed normal to me. The sensory demands of parenting felt extraordinarily hard to me, but everywhere I looked someone was talking or writing about how Parenting Is Hard, and so that seemed normal, too. My academic workdays looked nothing like my bakery days — no slow, methodical progress. They looked like scrambling: scrambling to get to daycare on time; scrambling to prep a class five minutes before teaching it; scrambling to type an email with one hand while nursing a baby; scrambling to submit final grades before the deadline; scrambling to pick a kid up early because he went to the nurse with a stomachache every time his kindergarten class did music. And who could blame him? I couldn’t. My children, like me, genuinely wanted to vomit when, under fluorescent lights, they were asked to participate (enthusiastically!) in some kind of sensory assault that was supposed to be fun or have meaning.

As for the rest of it, well, wasn’t that what all three of us — in daycare, in school, in college — were doing every day? Some of it was fun, and some of it had meaning, but so much of our days were under fluorescent lights with so many people, so many sounds and smells.

When I think about 2010 – 2020, I remember those years as a dull blur, like what you’d see from a Tilt-a-Whirl.

✦

In 2020, just as the six-week nationwide lockdown was beginning, my older son hit puberty. One afternoon he went upstairs to his room, and the next morning he had grown six inches, a mustache, and toe hair. He went back upstairs and locked the door, and didn’t unlock it for two years.

When schools reopened, my son continued to wear his mask long after the requirement had been lifted. On the ride to school most mornings, he panicked. One day I asked him what it was he dreaded so much and he said, “The lights are so bright and there’s nothing to look at.”

At home, he loved our dogs and his bedroom. I figured, COVID. I figured, mental health. I kept hearing about how all the kids were struggling.

✦

In 2023, when I left my academic job, I thought it would be a simple act of reinvention — something people my age did all the time, didn’t they? I was 46. Soon the window would close.

I dreamed about renting a space where I could spend all day making soup and baked goods, which I’d sell as a weekly meal subscription. I’d just need to cost everything out and learn how to write a business plan and be ready to lose a bunch of money.

Or, on second thought, maybe I could just find a new job where I interacted with fewer people.

I looked into technical writing.

I looked into UX design.

God, I was tired.

What if I took a year, I wondered. What if I took the buyout but continued to teach part-time to help our family scrape by? Would I find my way to something that felt rewarding and expansive — or did this current iteration of capitalism require me to choose between financial security and emotional health?

✦

In 2023, at the exact moment I left my job, my younger son hit puberty. One afternoon, he went upstairs to his room, and in the morning he came downstairs the same height as me but stronger. He was angry at the world and, by extension, me. He refused to go to school. I couldn’t make him. When I asked him what he dreaded so much, he described his day in detail — the way he was shuffled from one classroom to another, the way his every moment was managed, the way he had to write exactly five paragraphs, the way he had to stay in from recess if he couldn’t make himself do these arbitrary academic tasks on time.

The district threatened me with truancy court. My only option was to withdraw him and homeschool him.

Luckily, I wasn’t working.

By that time, the umbrella of what we call Autism had widened, and with that widening more people were talking about Autism in ways that reached me. When I learned about the many ways that Autism could look, it turned out that all three of us belonged underneath the umbrella. For my kids, puberty was their reckoning, and their puberty was my reckoning.

All three of us wanted and needed the same thing: less.

✦

I gave us that. I gave us less.

My younger son will continue to learn from home until he decides he’s ready to try something else.

My older son goes to an alternative high school where he only has to sit under the bright lights for two hours a day.

In this era of our lives, they get to wake at their own rhythms. My older son builds instruments while my younger son learns about deep space. They will miss some milestones and surpass others. When it comes to practicing for the 8-hour work day, they’re both hopelessly behind.

Institutions, by design, seek to flatten us. In public schools, when kids don’t perform at grade level, we activate interventions. The system works harder to make the child work harder, because every weakness is a problem to solve. But what if this leveling comes at great cost?

I used to pass as neurotypical largely because my time at institutions had flattened me. I suppressed my urges to vocally stim; I kept my special interests to myself; I left my office door ajar to conform to campus culture even though doing so destroyed my concentration. I came home every day feeling like a wrung-out sponge, but I knew no other way of feeling. I was the flattest, normalest version of myself. Stepping away has rendered me witchy and weird. Because I don’t have to push my kids out the door by 7:30am, I wake up and draw fragments of dreams. Outside, I make up songs while I walk my dog. I go days without talking to anyone but my partner, my kids, and my animals, and now I understand how much it cost me to speak out loud every day to students and colleagues in classes and meetings. It cost me the words I wanted to be writing. It cost me my connection to my body.

In 2022, the year before I left my job, I made $78,000, the most I’ve ever made.

Last year, I made $22,000, less than I made at 29. I’m 49 now.

I used to be the lead earner in a two-income family; now my partner’s work in construction has to stretch to cover most of our bills.

I care a little.

No, I care a lot. I care about money.

But I care more about thriving.

I care that my own thriving is essential to my children’s thriving — not only because they need me, but because they need me to model how it’s done, how to make a living while thriving.

To be clear, I haven’t figured that out yet.

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Jennifer’s essay highlights the inextricability of wealth and well-being, at least in the States, where most people have to hustle for health care and housing. Workin’ 9 to 5 — what a way to make a living! Especially when you’re barely gettin’ by, and it’s all takin’ and no givin’. (It’s no wonder folks are quiet quittin’…if not quiet crackin’, too.)

For additional insights into the lives of working people, a great place to start is Maximillian Alvarez’s podcast called — wait for it — Working People. Alvarez is an awesome interviewer, and we share his belief in the power of stories “to build a sense of shared struggle and solidarity between workers around the country.”

Or if you, like Jennifer, would rather be baking cakes, here are some wacky, whimsical ones for inspiration. (And no, they’re not cakes pretending to be other objects, though we’re into that, too.)

The icing on the cake? This compilation of Top 10 Movie Quitting Scenes. Now THOSE are inspiring…