Loving the Work, Hating the Way It's Done

There's something I almost never hear anyone talk about, and it's close to home for me. So let's talk about it.

The thing you chose

At some point you chose an education, and a profession followed from it. Let's assume you chose it because you liked it, maybe even loooved it. Enough to put in the hours, the years of studying and training, the slow building of real expertise. You remember how proud you were when you got certified, and how good it felt to land that first proper job. This was your thing.

And then you ended up in ‘the way it's done’.

Pickets and fences

Some professions come with schedules that seem to assume you don't have a life. Others come with audit systems and accreditation rules so tight you spend half your time proving you did the work instead of doing it. There's the corporate ladder you're supposed to want to climb, and the job title itself, which dictates what you're allowed to be, what you're allowed to do, and what falls outside your lane.

Pickets and fences. Defending the fences. Being worthy of the fences. Staying inside the fences.

For a while, that's just the price of admission. You're busy learning, building, earning.

Then you change

Your body changes, your life changes, your circumstances change. Kids, ageing parents, your health, your hormones, a divorce, or simply being ten years older and a lot less willing to pretend and submit. The way the job is done usually doesn't change with you. The format is the format.

And then one day you catch yourself thinking something that feels almost forbidden: I love what I do, and I f-ing hate how I have to do it.

Both can be true at the same time. It doesn't make you bad at your job, and it doesn't make you ungrateful. It doesn't even mean you chose wrong. It means you've outgrown the container, not the content.

My own version

I could write a whole book series about my own experience with this. Or I could try to say it in a few sentences (and short is hard for me!), so here goes.

I made some pretty funky life and study decisions when I was young. Not very rational ones, more following where I felt guided. Intuition. It landed me somewhere I never would have imagined ending up. But I liked it, I was pretty good at it, and I learned A LOT. My biggest takeaway: what I would never let happen to myself again.

It led me to being my own boss, to endless hours with my hands on animals, to deeply feeling, connecting with and learning about the nervous system and energy. I needed all of that to end up where I stand now. So, zero regrets.

The grief nobody names

What nobody really talks about is that this process, this awareness, holds a kind of grief. Mostly the hidden kind, because what do you tell people? Or yourself, for that matter? It takes time to even notice it, let alone put it into words.

"I finally have what I worked twenty years for, and I'm sick of it" isn't exactly something you say at a birthday party. So you swallow it, for a long time, and you carry on. And grief you swallow has a way of turning into resentment: towards the system, the management, the clients, and sometimes eventually towards the work itself. The very thing you love. And honestly, that's the best-case scenario. More often, it literally makes you ill.

That's the real loss. Not the job, but the love slowly getting poisoned by the format.

Wasn't this what you always wished for?

That's the question nagging underneath it all. And the honest answer is yes, it was. For who you were back then. Someone who was really good at being a good student, a good person. Hardworking. Ready to contribute, ready to put in the work.

You're allowed to want something different for who you are now. That isn't quitting or failing. Quite the opposite.

Your expertise was never stored in your job title. It lives in your hands, your head and your gut, built up over years, and it travels with you wherever you go.

Untie the knot

I'm not telling you to hand in your notice tomorrow. I'm asking you to stop pretending the friction isn't there.

A good place to start is pulling the two apart. Take a piece of paper and write down what you love on one side: the actual work, the moments that still light you up. On the other side, write down what you've come to hate about the way it's done. Most people have never separated those two. It's all one big knot in the stomach called "my job."

Once you untie it, you might find the love is still completely intact. It just needs an upgrade. On your own terms.

I would love to help you explore.

Love, Annemarijn

Ready for a different format?

If you're ready for a change of format but don't have a clue where to start, SPINE is the best way to explore exactly that.

SPINE isn't built to turn everyone into an entrepreneur, and it isn't about throwing everything overboard in one big sweep. It's meant to help you reposition: to take stock of where you are, and to move from there.

Not moving from "how it's always been done." Not moving from how everybody else does it. But making a conscious move from what you need, at this point in your life.

That's it, really.

SPINE is here, waiting for you to make a move. Explore SPINE If you feel something humming inside, I'd listen to it if I were you.