When I first started blogging, I read Dooce’s advice to avoid blogging about work, and I thought, “You know, those sound like words to live by, especially for a woman who has confidentiality agreements with her consulting partners and her clients.” And for the past three years I have eschewed (eschewn?) the subject. I always regretted it a bit, though, because I’ve always liked my job and I’ve certainly had a lot I could say about it. I’m an English major working in disciplines (medicine and computers) in which I’ve had no formal training, in a field (clinical research) that I didn’t even know existed until I entered it on the wrong side of thirty. I have “mommy job” flexibility in my hours, without the low “mommy pay.” And, unlike most people I know, I’ve been really happy with my work.

Until recently.

I have had a very successful year, but a number of factors have combined to prompt me to envision a future where I might not be so successful. There is the economy; my growing reluctance to “sell” myself via a string of tiresome speaking engagements; and increased competition in my field, in some cases from people who were paying ME for advice just a few years ago. I have come to the conclusion that it would be best for my career if I went off and, you know, actually WORKED somewhere, instead of just sitting at home getting paid for giving people advice that they mostly don’t follow anyway, and then ending up as one of those superannuated consultants who haunts industry meetings, running on about her pet management theory.

It’s been hard to leave, though. Leaving a job can be like leaving a relationship. Some boyfriends are total losers, clearly toxic, and all your friends will cheer you when you make the move. Other boyfriends are nice enough, just not terribly exciting, and you may feel bad about leaving until you start to see how much more fun some of the other options look. But other boyfriends will sing your praises in public and fly you all over the world and buy you diamonds and furs and sometimes, not often, but sometimes throw a little verbal abuse your way in private so you don’t get any ideas about leaving them. And while some of your friends will tell you that you don’t need that crap and should walk away, others will tsk tsk and say, “Every relationship has problems. The grass is not always greener…” and you will start to have second thoughts about the feasibility of finding someone else who can support you in the manner to which you have become accustomed.

So that’s where I’ve been the last few months, evaluating my need to leave against my need to pay my share of the mortgage on the house AND have enough left over to pay someone else to make the beds in said house. I have been paralyzed with fear over this decision, and I believe Husband’s phone log during those months would reveal calls to McLean to ask if they offered such a thing as in-patient career counseling? And would I have to commit myself, or could he sign the papers? It has not been pretty.

But after a lot of soul-searching I let it slip to a few key people that I was looking for a job, and one thing led to another very quickly (elapsed time from announcement to offer: twenty minutes), and on Friday I finally burst through my inertia to sign the papers and break the news to my current employer. And suddenly a few things that I thought I would miss about my old life (”I won’t be going to Europe any more…I’ll have to get up and take the train a few days a week”) seemed like raging positives (”I won’t have to spend Sunday nights in the airport any more! It might be good for me to get out of the house and talk to other people a few days a week!”)

After seven years, I’m turning the page.