This is more of an “RL Ambivalence.”
So TL;DR - I basically quit my retail job because it was just getting to me too much, and a whole bunch of things involved I’m not going into. I basically got the high-risk part of the high-reward thing I was volunteered for as part of the remodel that’s going on. I was not slated for termination; that was my decision simply because I didn’t see how a personal LOA would solve anything (which would be LOA #3 for almost the same reasons as the first two).
So what’s the other side of this? I feel like I’ve not so much liberated myself so much as forced myself to confront some issues with respect to employment, and what I can and can’t do with the degree I got on my employer’s dime and finished last year. (Still hate job search, though.)
… I just have some serious deadlines due to the financial state, and the worst case scenario is I could ask for (very conditional) reinstatement to said retail job, but that deadline is about 7d tops from today.
But I feel like this got me to actually take myself more seriously instead of wallow in imposter syndrome. A few things that came up over the past almost 12 years at said job convinced me that I have… more of a handle on CS topics than I thought I did when comparing to others. And that’s without getting into vibe coding and other agent-based programming soapboxes.
So yeah, happy to start discovering myself more in a very ironic way, but also
at the same time.