Don't ask me if I'm scared because it doesn't matter either way.
No new progress on the book this week because I'm finishing up the final touches on the Christian Witch 10 Week Introductory Course and the Christian Witch Apprenticeship Program, both of which go live this Saturday, April 1st.
If you'd like to apply for the apprenticeship program, you can do so here!
So, I did something a little crazy.
Alright, maybe something really crazy.
But this Monday, I let my workplace know that I wasn't coming back. I'd been on stress leave for the past month or so, because the toll it was taking on me to work a full time, 40 hour a week job, while also diving deeper into my passions in ministry, writing, and content creation, were just too much.
I was snappy with my loved ones. I was irritable all the time. I was drowning in fatigue to the point that I felt like I'd been run over by a bus as soon as I opened my eyes in the morning—running on E right at the very start of the day. The 3PM sluggishness that followed was more like a 3PM KO. How I even got through the day like that, I'll never know. But what I did know was something that scared me more than any consequences of the risks I'm taking now:
I knew that I was slowly dying. I could feel it. Like once healthy soil gone barren, I was just being stripped down to nothing, and spreading myself so thin that there was nothing I could do but just try to keep up. And no amount of money or security or benefits was going to be worth the way I was feeling, or the fatigue that always squeezed my head like a rubber band. The biggest culprit of all this, though, besides the physical toll of essentially working 80 hours a week, was that my heart just wasn't in the work I did at that job anymore.
There's one thing I think a lot of us are discovering lately, and I think it's that not very many of us are actually cut out for working a menial nine to five for results and numbers that higher ups like. At some point, even the "rewarding" elements of a job stops having the hypnotizing effect when they strap you to a chair for hours on end and make you do work that, honestly, isn't that serious and doesn't need to keep you strapped there like some dog on a leash.
I see now that I am not cut out for it. I am not one that is able to answer to demanding higher ups and take on new projects at the drop of a hat on Thursday evenings or jump every time my work phone pings, dreading to see the name of the sender.
If I'm going to work, then the only one higher up than me is going to be God Himself.
Damn, Sara. How Bad Was the Job?
It wasn't bad at all at first. It was a good job, honestly. I did social media management for a local human services company, sharing the stories of people we supported as they went and found jobs, made friends in their community, volunteered for good causes, competed in Special Olympics, o on and so forth. I would go to events to film videos; I would shadow people at local businesses all across Rhode Island. I even bounced around the State House a couple times for political events (because you always have to stay vigilant with politicians; they always like to cut the budgets that they should be expanding).
Back when all I had was this job and my morning bit of writing, it wasn't really a big deal. I could do the job no problem, easy peasy. Even doing my MFA while working this job wasn't that bad. But that was all while I lived with my parents and didn't have a sense of what I really wanted to spend my life doing.
Then the pandemic hit, and a lot of things changed. Some for the better, some for the worse.
With all these responsibilities piled on me in my own apartment, and my debut novel published, and my calling to teaching the Christian craft made very apparent, what once was an alright job that I didn't mind became an active force holding me back. It became a cage that was too small, a collar put on too tight. That's the double-edged sword that is passion: even things that are objectively not so bad become absolutely unbearable when they tear you away from what you love. Here I was thinking I was a bad worker because I was having such a challenge trying to focus on the fourteenth post about folks grabbing lunch at a local eatery. Turns out, after being able to work like hell on all the things I love, that I just wasn't into it.
And you can bet that a slowly degrading workplace culture didn't help, either. The last few months I actually worked at my agency were a nightmare. I hated every minute of it. I hated every time I had to open my e-mail, or answer a text, or write a post. And God forbid I missed an e-mail by five minutes. You'd think the world was ending, the way some people reacted.
All that aside, it was the definition of a Catch-22. I couldn't stop working the job because I needed the money, but I couldn't develop my true passion into something that could support me because the job took up all my spare time. I made it a good year and a half juggling it all anyway, though, burning the candle from both ends. But by the end of February, I simply did not have any more fight in me, and I knew I had to make a choice.
So now I'm choosing. I'm choosing me, and I'm choosing the community I've become a part of. I'm terrified of where I'll be in a year from now, and what I'll manage to accomplish. I'm anxious to know if I'll be okay a year from now, confident and happy, and if things will have worked out enough that I can keep going. I'm angry that it had to come to this, and that I hadn't done it sooner.
But those emotions, while natural in this situation, I also know aren't the most useful. So I'm putting them aside. I'm gearing up to pitch while hoping God's wearing a solid baseball mitt, because I'm tossing it all His way and trusting He won't let me fall on my face.
After all, it's Him who helped me find this passion in the first place.
Sara Raztresen is a Slovene-American writer, screenwriter, and Christian witch. Her fantasy works draw heavily on the wisdom she gathers from her own personal and spiritual experience, and her spiritual practice borrows much of the whimsy and wonder that modern society has relegated to fairy-and-folktale. Her goal is to help people regain their spiritual footing and discover God through a new (yet old) lens of mysticism.
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