Crossing Over
Reading Time: 5 minutesI Quit My Corporate Job to Become a Crossing Guard. It’s Perfect., After many years holding down a corporate job to get health insurance, I’ve finally found a better way to make ends meet and do my art: I’m a crossing guard., I left my corporate job to bec
This is part of Quit It, a series of essays on stopping things—or not.
On paper, things were looking pretty great for me this spring: My debut novel came out in November 2022, and I was working on a second novel under contract. I had a full-time job as a writer at a mental health startup that was remote and paid well, with nice Zoom co-workers and a mission that resonated with me: to provide better access to cognitive behavioral therapy tools.
But my own mental health was terrible. I felt exhausted, anxious, stressed, and weirdly lonely. There never seemed to be enough time. I was languishing. Something had to give, but I couldn’t imagine what or how.
Anyone who pursues a nonstandard creative career in America and doesn’t have generational wealth or a rich spouse will likely hold at least two jobs. One job is the creative work, and the other is whatever ensures you don’t go bankrupt and die. My spouse is also an artist, whose second job is being a ‘PowerPoint guy’ for corporate meetings, which is 100 percent a real job … and 100 percent freelance. That means our health insurance has to come from me.
But this spring, I was writing a new and challenging novel on deadline while also continually marketing the first, and doing cool author stuff like attending book conferences, teaching classes, and occasionally booking speaking engagements and interviews. Managing the opportunities that came after the publication of my debut novel became its own job, one I had toiled for 15 years to achieve and was not willing to give up. The problem was that all this made having a demanding full-time job almost impossible.
If I quit the mental-health-startup job, I knew I could drum up freelance writing to make up for the financial gaps. Sure, marketplace health insurance was technically an option, but it A) is absurdly expensive and B) sucks. What I really needed was the artist’s job unicorn: a lightweight part-time job with benefits. My first thought was Starbucks, even though their benefits eligibility page reads like a riddle from a capitalist bridge troll: ‘You establish initial benefits eligibility the first day of the second month after receiving at least 240 total hours over three full, consecutive months.’ But I worried that a Starbucks job would just make me a different kind of exhausted.
Then, while walking around my neighborhood, I saw a sign stuck in the grass: Looking for flexible, part-time work with benefits?
And below that: Become a school crossing guard.
Now look, I’m not one of those signs-from-the-universe types. But when the universe gives your skull a ‘Hello McFly‘ with its knuckles, you listen. So I scanned the QR code and applied, and one week later, I had a phone interview.
Turns out, the crossing guard job was 10 hours per week, and offered access to affordable health insurance (yay unions!) for me and my spouse. Crossing guards choose their intersection, and there was one available a block and a half from my house, on a quiet side street. My daily commute would be a whopping 45 seconds. This all made me so excited that when the supervisor asked why I wanted the job, I broke my rule of never answering that question honestly and said I needed an easy job with health insurance. ‘Then this is perfect for you,’ she said, and I was hired on the spot. Yes, it was technically an 85 percent pay cut. But my soon-to-be former job was going to let me freelance for them, so the money part was, at least temporarily, a nonissue.
Given my practical reasoning, I did not anticipate how much I would love this job. How dramatically it would improve my mental health, and how much a sense of purpose and belonging it would give me. To be clear, I am not a person who likes jobs. I have never gone to work and felt better after. But being a crossing guard is unlike tech or retail or other service jobs I’ve held. I’m not serving anyone else’s profit or consumption. My purpose is to be a friendly, reliable presence in the neighborhood, along with, of course, keeping car-to-pedestrian altercations at a minimum. My physical body is a necessary part of the job, unlike in remote work, where I generally felt like a disembodied head and fingers. And after so many pandemic years of feeling like bodies were dangerous vectors of disease, the daily personal interactions that come with the job have been surprisingly healing.
Now, I have no co-workers. But there is a kid who puts a sticker on my day-glo vest every day. A tiny girl who is happier to see me than my own mother is. A dog who lets me pet him while I chat with his owner after their morning walk (perhaps to make up for the one time he managed to pee in my coffee—the dog, that is, not the owner).
For the most part, my role is to have 10-second interactions with these neighbors. That’s enough for a good morning or buenos días, a have a good day or que tenga un buen día, or even just a wave and a smile.
My dense Chicago neighborhood prides itself on community. There are people who have just moved in and people who have been here for decades. The neighborhood has single-family homes, apartment buildings large and small, and several families of refugees living in the church. Many of my neighbors work closely with each other and the alderman on hyperlocal and citywide political endeavors. There are even micro-neighborhood Facebook groups for individual intersections, which I learned about when one neighbor told me she subscribes to my Substack because someone linked to it there. Yes, I’m here for children’s safety, but I feel more like an anchor—a focal point that the chaos of the neighborhood can rest and relax around for a moment before going on with their day. I feel like I am directly boosting the mental health of dozens of people just by being nice—an aspect of this job that I could never have predicted when I left my corporate one. And, in fact, there is research suggesting that friendly, low-stakes interactions—like the ones I have with my neighbors every day—can improve everyone’s mental health in a meaningful and direct way. In 1973, Stanford sociology professor Mark Granovetter coined the terms ‘weak ties’ to refer to acquaintances and ‘strong ties’ to mean close friends, family, and partners. In his paper The Strength of Weak Ties, he developed the surprising idea that when it comes to relationships, the quantity of social ties may be as important as quality. And some recent studies hint at the possibility that quantity might matter even more than we thought for mental health and a sense of belonging. I have certainly felt this way in my new job, and hopefully I’m providing the same for my neighbors.
There are, of course, downsides. For example: Chicago weather is notoriously, operatically terrible. Also, an angry guy in an SUV full of poodles yells at me every day and once nearly ran me over. But all in all, the pros far outweigh the cons.
All this (including, of course, the health insurance) has made my decision to quit a high-status job for the neon vest and unofficial title of Professional Small-Talker undeniably the right decision for me. This is not to say my ego didn’t protest when I quit. I’m 45 years old, for crying out loud, shouldn’t I be more … stable and responsible? Also, my social circle is weirdly full of epidemiologists, doctors, scientists, actually famous writers, and C-suiters. Everyone has been fully supportive of (and, frankly, delighted by) my decision. But that doesn’t make me any less likely to compare my choices to theirs.
Ultimately, though, becoming a crossing guard is as close as I’ve ever gotten to balancing my art and mental health and money. In fact, after working this job for six months, I’m not sure my dream is to be a 100 percent butt-in-chair novelist anymore. I like being out in the world and interacting with people. And—bonus!—I’ve got a whole new set of experiences and material to pull from.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2024/01/corporate-job-quit-now-crossing-guard.html
Ref: slate
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