The Millennial Urge to Quit A Job That Was Killing My Soul.

I was always supposed to quit my job. Years before phrases like "The Great Resignation" were common household rhetoric, I was saving money and choosing locations and setting dates like I was planning my wedding. My family was unfazed by this behavior, though not entirely unconcerned. I had quit jobs in the past, which was why this was nothing new. But now I was planning on leaving a "good career.” The kind that comes with "benefits" and "retirement security" and "money no one walks away from". Which is where the cause for concern at my itchy feet was taking center stage.

But I'm starting at the end, and I really should go back to the beginning. When I began working with court involved youth on the SouthSide of Chicago for Cook County Juvenile Court, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I thought I did, as most young, college educated women typically do when accepting their first job. I had a degree, I had done some international travel and that meant I could do anything, anywhere. It didn't matter that I had never even been to the south side, let alone interacted with anyone who was from there. My job was to help kids stay on the straight and narrow and I was going to be trained to pass on the "best practices" of how the court thought they should do that. Anything beyond that was no longer my responsibility.

But I very quickly learned that working within the realm of people's personal lives meant there is always responsibility, and as a helper, I would be the one to feel the weight of it. This wasn't the kind of job where I could turn off my computer and go home for the day without a thought about work until I returned the next morning. I brought everything home with me. Knowing the things that happened, how couldn't I? Would you be able to go about the rest of your day and not think about the teenage girl you've been working with for two years whose boyfriend put a bullet in her head that afternoon? Would you be willing to pretend it was normal to pull up to a gang fight in the street and jump in to drag out your kid before the police show up? I couldn't not answer the phone when it rang at 2am, even though I knew the kind of pain that was going to be on the other end of that call. Maybe the people who last long in the department could. Maybe I was just fucking terrible at setting boundaries. All I knew was that tragedy seemed inescapable.

The way I looked at the job, being able to build and maintain the kind of relationship that can effect change within the lives of youth required the phyiscal availability and willingness to show up whenever needed. The mental capacity to learn how to understand their world and how it differs from your own. The emotional commitment that they won't fight their battles alone. To show up and be there, especially during the moments no one is trained for. And that encompassing comprehension came with an enormous amount of responsibility. Because my training didn't include what to do when "best practices" don't account for systemic racism, or address white saviourism, or unpack the ways intentional injustice within the system perpetuates the very factors it claims to fight. I was taught how to interview a client, not how to keep calm when you see the person who shot them freely walking down the street. I was taught how to check if a client was attending school, not how to check if a bullet lodged in their torso from the previous year was starting to move. My training didn't include how to process walking into work and being told a kid you've been working with for months or years is dead, killed violently on the same street I had just spent time with them in the day before. Every day, every moment, was a tense waiting for the other shoe to drop. Nothing within this job was normal. Yet I was conditioned to believe that within the context of the Criminal Justice system this is just the way things are.

But for all the bad that happened, there was still so much good. So much love and support. Goals accomplished. Weeks of perfect school attendance. Progress in counseling. New jobs. Prom pictures. Graduations. Ping pong and pool games. The kinds of knowing and levels of laughter that occur between people who are simply a part of each other's every day lives. These were the parts that kept me going.

But I knew this job wasn't sustainable for me, for a multitude of reasons. I always knew I wouldn't last long term and within a few years I began to fantasize about taking all of my savings, packing my backpack and leaving to travel the world. After my fifth and hardest year, I made a plan. As 2019 came to a close, I innocently chose May 1, 2020 as the day I would hand in my notice and we all know what came next. While counting down the time until that was finally a reality, Covid happened. The world collectively shut down. I was confined to my home and so were all of my kids, too. Many without basic necessities. Many with abusers. And some, who knew where they really were, because they didn't even have a home to be confined to.

Within the realm of juvenile probation, Covid didn't stop the violence or the suffering. It exacerbated both. It made the bad things worse and it made the good things gone. Without the good, I wasn’t long for that world. I held on as long as I was able, even though my ability to connect and show up fully was now so very limited. When the world started to open up again in 2021 and vaccines were on the horizon, I knew it was time. My tank was empty. I was no longer able to give what I should to the work and that meant I was likely doing more harm than good. So I quit. One year ago to this day.

I've wondered if I made the right choice countless times over the last year. I wonder where certain kids are now and if they're okay. I wonder if they think I abandoned them. I still get updates on a few clients I was close to that were inherited by co-workers I keep in contact with and it's still gutwrenching to hear when violence strikes them. Those moments take me right back to the feelings of anguish and helplessness I tried to leave behind, when there is nothing you can do but wait, hope and pray to a god you don’t even believe in.

As I write this reflection on my past life from my current life, packed into a backpack at a hostel in Mexico City, I can't help but think about a phone call I received a month ago from one of my most difficult former clients. He and I had an extremely unique relationship over the course of four years, involving the kind of depth I hope to document in a later article, to give his life and his story and his heart the credit it deserves. Seeing the incoming call from Cook County Jail on my screen sent a jolt through my heart because as the only client to ever memorize my phone number, I knew it was him. And now I knew where he unfortunately was. I answered the call and hearing his voice caused his last words to me from years ago, "I hate you," to echo through my head. I asked him if he was okay. He said he'd been locked up for almost a year and had been thinking a lot about how certain things I'd said and done that he resented and thought were to harm him at the time were actually to help him, and he could finally see that now. I told him I was sorry for the ways the system had failed him. Because in spite of the ways I had helped, there were still circumstances where my role in the system played a part in the failures he was forced to endure. Our conversation was brief but powerful. And it wasn't until that moment that I realized how much guilt I had been holding onto for the things that had happened to him. On a surface level I knew his choices were his own and the outcome of his life depended solely on him. But that didn't stop me from wondering if I could have done more, if I could have done something differently. If I had even been the right person to do this job in the first place.

The what if’s are haunting. But I know no one can save anyone else in this life. Nor is it anyone's personal job to do so. Over the past year I've come to understand that I was in those kids lives when I was and they were in mine how they were for many reasons. They served the purpose they were meant to and then the tugging at my soul told me it was time to go. Because remember, I was always supposed to quit this job. This job that I came to love, no matter how much it hurt. This job that taught me how the difference between life and death, right and wrong, captive and free, is forever hanging in the balance of a single moment. And that even though none of us are here to save each other, we sure as hell should do whatever we can to help each other out along the way.

I struggled with how to write about this for a while. I didn’t know if I wanted to write about it at all. And once I started I felt like I was rambling and unable to convey the full truth of the reality I was attempting to describe. But that’s okay. Because in the end this is just for me, anyway. To talk about how I walked away from “benefits” and “retirement security” that had absolutely nothing to do with what I really had. The heart and soul, the passion and grief, the wisdom and resilience, of the people I found at a job I was always supposed to quit.