Quitting My Job Turned Me Into a Girlboss

One year ago, I ended a 13-year career in tech to be a "slow life" SAHM and writer. I've since become a workaholic.

Photo by Elena Mishlanova on Unsplash

For a while, I was known as “the woman who gets fired all the time,” both on Twitter/Substack but also, frankly, in real life by the people who were constantly firing me. I’ve written a plethora of personal essays about nightmarish work experiences, a viral essay about how often I was getting fired, and recently, a retrospective on how I kept a job for three years without working. People call me a lot of things, but “that socially awkward mom shitposter who gets fired all the time and insists on wearing skintight bubblegum co-ord sets that are not appropriate for her age or body type” is up there.

Anyway, I’m coming up on the one-year anniversary of when I ended my thirteen-year career in tech to become a full-time Substack writer. In my mind, I envisioned one of those “In Memorium” montages, except it was all the bosses and HR ladies who fired me. I saw it more as ending the concept of work entirely, not that Substack would become my job. I saw Substack as a means to an end, a way that I could finally acquire the coveted role of those “slow life” SAHMs I kept seeing on Instagram—the moms who were seemingly always wearing chunky cable knit ivory cardigans while their children peacefully sipped hot apple cider while making watercolors. After thirteen years of rushing to hit deadlines (just kidding—I never hit them lol!) I was eager to let it all go and just relax. I dreamed of lazing around all day at the library with my kids, my mind finally free from the constant slog of Work Anxiety.

Only one problem—this career move did not make me relax. For some stupid reason, I didn’t consider that the problem wasn’t that I was working too much, or expending too much energy on work, but that I was working in a field where I was untalented and bored. I assumed that I “didn’t like to work,” that I had an ideological opposition to the concept of work, that I was a tradwife born in the wrong era, or that I was lazy. The truth was, I was a workaholic girlboss waiting to be unleashed, and all I needed was the most ruthless, high-pressure job of all: a Substack writer.