i quit
I gave notice in August.
My last day will be December 31. By then I'll have been there for five years.
Still employed in this picture. Merano below, a few weeks ago.
I quit my 9-to-5 to work 24/7, as the line goes.
In my case, the order is wrong. The 24/7 has been running for a while, evenings and weekends, on top of the 9-to-5. Until the end of December I do both. From January, one job.
What exactly that looks like, I'm still figuring out.
I slept very well the night before I quit, which should have told me something earlier.
I think I told my brother first. He said congratulations.
For me, being employed, even in a good job that pays well, means giving someone else some control over my time. Parts of the week are fixed before I have a say. That is part of the deal, and I'm not complaining. In my current job I have lots of flexibility, and I'm grateful for that. Still, working on my own will be different.
I sometimes ask myself what a typical Tuesday will look like in January. Probably more time to think things through properly, on my own schedule, without driving to Bolzano first. That's the part I'm looking forward to.
Maybe in two years I'll say it was a nice experience and nothing more. Even then, I'll have learned something from it, 100%.
Most of the useful changes in my life have been subtractions.
Closed a coffee bar in Berlin, years ago.
Left Berlin (for the second time), in 2021.
Stopped working for a few months at a time, more than once.
Deleted 1,734 newsletter subscribers who never opened it, two weeks ago.
This is now the biggest one so far.
After five years in South Tyrol, it feels like our time here has run its course. We had very good times, and a few not-so-nice ones. Some were personal. Even after five years, we still often feel like tourists here. We did make friends, and we keep them close to our hearts, but that tourist feeling never entirely went away.
Quitting was the smaller decision. The bigger one, leaving Merano and travelling for a while, Sina and I carried around for about a year. Most of the thinking happened in Taiwan in February. Then we gave ourselves six to eight weeks to make a final decision. We did.
In two weeks, the container arrives. We're wrapping everything up here and will leave Merano in October. Sina, the three kids, me. The container goes into storage, because we don't know where we'll end up after Merano. Maybe we come back, maybe not. Portugal is the only fixed stop. After that, we don't know, and this is kind of the pathless path. I wrote about this before.
What if it doesn't work out?
We have a few months of runway, so there is pressure. I think the kids are going to handle it pretty well. They went to school in Auckland last year, and that was super easy. This time we'll homeschool them for the year. In Italy that is a fairly simple process (at least the signing-off part, not the teaching part.) A first for us. Another fear is that we'll need a very strict schedule to manage everything.
People tell me this takes courage. It felt more like paperwork. The thought was a year old by the time I signed anything.
Mostly, I'm thinking about what life will look like next year.
