I spent a lot of time over the past few years looking for a new way to be professional.

My nervous breakdown slash autism surprise slash ADHD diagnosis slash leaving the workforce slash trying to find myself as a human without inserting myself into toxic and unhealthy cultures came at an inconvenient time, frankly. The unemployment rate is bad. Like not good. Not the old 20th century slang for sooooo good.

I applied for too many jobs to recall. I had a handful of interviews. I had a lot of conversations with my partner about how important it is to find a place I want to be as much as they want to have me. He nodded a lot. He meant it. Neither of us could find that place.

I tried to be a jewelry maker for a little while. But of course make it woowoo. I was making malas — prayer beads rooted in Hindu and Buddhist practice, used for counting mantras and meditation. A traditional mala has 108 regular beads and a bonus 109th called the guru bead, which represents the bond between teacher and student. It holds the energy generated during practice. It’s the seat of something sacred.

When I realized I was using mine as a timer, not as a sacred energy source, I decided to make my own mala. A secular mala. Which somehow was still pretty fucking woowoo. No guru bead, no claim to a tradition that wasn’t mine. I do not like to fuck with another man’s sacred.

And making the mala, it was so lovely that I made another. And another. And then I was like everyone needs a secular mala.

It turned out a lot like any kind of project I take on — I made a lot of something beautiful and precious, in this case semi-precious stone hand-tied necklaces and then I was too shy and awkward to sell them or give them away. A few friends who actually understood the tradition asked me to make malas with the full traditional styling, and that was fine because they were using them in accordance with what they were meant for. But when I thought about selling more widely I realized that once a mala left my hands, how someone used it was not up to me. That thought was hard to sit with.

I do have a bunch of really pretty necklaces sitting around if you’d like to buy one. They’re secular.

I talked to fractional executives who carved up their expertise and sold it by the slice. I had a brief infatuation with Chief of Staff as a Service. I went pretty deep into that rabbit hole. I came back out with a lot of admiration for people who can do it and the quiet certainty that it would not be a sustainable path for me. I don’t want to hold that many separate company cores in my head. I don’t think I can without giving up a big chunk of myself.

I explored community. I put the word community next to every modifier I could find. Community strategy. Community management. Community engagement. Community building. Community operations. Community retention. Community development. Community experience. I spent eleven years doing community work in open source and I couldn’t figure out which version of the word described what I actually did. Every time I got close to naming it, I lost interest — or I hit a wall that was in place for a good reason.

I did the same thing with operations. Operations management. Operations strategy. Revenue operations. People operations. Creative operations. Every one of them sounded like something I could do in theory and would hate in practice. The word “operations” is the professional equivalent of beige.

I talked to freelancers who hated freelancing. They missed teams and structure and someone else worrying about health insurance. I talked to freelancers who loved freelancing. They were a different species, one which I felt was best admired from a safe distance.

I sent a lot of emails to people I knew who worked at companies I was considering applying for asking for the inside scoop. Not for a recommendation or a referral, but to tell me what it’s really like to be there once the work honeymoon period is over. And because of the stand I’ve taken on working somewhere that’s incompatible with my moral center or toxic for the people who work there, pretty much ruled them all out. One by one the doors closed. Not because they were locked. Because I couldn’t walk through them without leaving a piece of myself on the other side.

Scattered throughout this season of searching were the brief but meaningful conversations every time I had a chronic illness flare, a glut of doctors appointments, or had to stop taking a medication that was supposed to be helping that wasn’t. The entire conversation goes like this. Him: I am so glad you’re not working right now. Me: blank stare because he’s totally and completely right but fuck everything this sucks.

Those were the weeks and months where I didn’t try anything. Where the only professional development I did was developing the ability to admit that I needed to rest. That Rick was right and it’s a really good thing I wasn’t working. Because simply put, I couldn’t have.

As I was saying. I’ve been looking for a way to be professional again for a long time…