Seatbelts & Spring Form Pans

When the confines of structure come with an upside.

The metaphor: 

I started a new job this past week, after a few months without one. The return to office work has me reflecting on structure, and how even when I don’t like it, it helps hold me together – the way a springform pan keeps cake batter in place while it bakes. 

The story: 

I only got into one college. 

As a high school senior wanting a degree, that gave me two choices: go to that college or take a year off to reapply. I’ve faced tough choices and this wasn’t one of them. I didn’t know much at the time, as evidenced by my college application strategy: nine waitlists, one rejection, and one acceptance. But I knew without question that I wouldn’t do well with time off.

I could feel that I was sort of an underdone cake and that the structure of school was the springform pan holding me together while I baked. I was lucky to have the option of college, but I was also lucky that gap years weren’t as popular yet in 2004, and that no one was encouraging me to take one.

As a student, I was curious and disciplined, quick with new concepts and (obnoxiously?) comfortable speaking in class. I could make small-scale decisions with ease and enthusiasm, choosing between different majors and classes. I secured summer internships out of state and studied abroad across the world. But I didn’t have it in me to set my own goals and direction, outside that structure.  

Perhaps it’s a personal weakness that I wasn’t self-guided. Perhaps it resulted from too much structure in childhood, shuttling from pre-school orchestra to after-school sports, going to camp in the summers. I loved it, but I had no idea what to do with myself outside its confines. I needed not just the clarity of the curriculum, laying out what to learn and how I’d be evaluated, but the sense of shared momentum with my peers. We had moved up, year by year, through my achievement-oriented public school; now we were largely going to college. If I stepped off the treadmill, I’d simply have stood there, dazed, as my cohort glided by. So I enrolled.

My college had a student-run coffee shop where many of my friends worked shifts, making bad coffee and showing off their music collections through the speaker system. It was the mid-2000s, almost ten years since Wyclef Jean released his first solo album, but when I hear the opening riff to “Gone Till November,” I’m back in the overstuffed couches, shoulder to shoulder with students planning smoke breaks as that song played. 

Before I had jobs beyond lifeguard and camp counselor, Wyclef’s lyrics made me contemplate work. The chorus melodically explains that the song’s narrator will be away for months – until November – because as a Genius lyric note puts it, “He doesn’t have the patience to make slow money at a boring job. The allure of fast money from drug dealing is too great for him.” Even at the time, singing along to the syncopated refrain, I could feel the opposite was true about me: that I found office jobs not just tolerable but alluring, irresistible. In my mind, I changed the lyrics for myself: “See, you must understand, I must work a 9 to 5.” I didn’t know then that it would be an 8 to 6, or sometimes a 10 to 10, but it made me smile to turn this counter-culture anthem into an ode to structure. 

I’ve long heard friends say they hoped for careers where they weren’t stuck at a desk or could do something different every day. I couldn't disagree more. I wanted as much structure and routine as they’d give me. Like avoiding a gap year on my way to college, sitting down to an office job felt less like a choice and more like an imperative, an option I was desperately lucky to have, given some fundamental aspect of my constitution. In the real world, I’m so left-footed. Everything takes effort: remembering to build in travel time – and buffer – so I get places before events start. Checking each instruction in a recipe multiple times because I can’t retain it while I measure out a cup – a cup? – a cup of flour – all purpose flour? – a cup of all purpose flour to mix with baking soda – baking powder? – baking soda – a tablespoon, a tablespoon? A tablespoon, my irritation growing with each internal stutter. 

In college, my computer was a portal to a place where I found flow, where essays about themes sprouted from my typing fingers, blooming with thoughts that surprised and transfixed me. Once I graduated, I confirmed my hunch about the office job, responding to the intangible infrastructure-building of nonprofit operations like a little kid whose thoughts come faster than their words: “And pretend – pretend – pretend this is a castle! And you’re, you’re the dragon…” In an office job, I have the vision and dynamism of an orchestra conductor, coaxing out harmonies from my email system, my meeting facilitation, my document structure. That intangible world is beautiful to me, forever a book reader, a world builder, a play-pretend kid.

My first full-time position was in DC, office job Mecca, where I moved into a rowhouse with five friends. Just like college had kept my runny pastry of a personality in place, I could feel the tides of the city’s shared schedule giving form and structure to my days. Commuting with the masses helping me traverse the treacherous physical world to sit down at my desk and dream operations into being.

Working all day was a daunting change from college, especially that first summer of my life without a multi-month break. Even with the general rhythms of the city underscoring my schedule, I struggled to get out the door on time each morning and to pry myself out of the office each night. I was eager to be home, but it was hard to put aside whatever I’d been thinking about. One of my roommates worked at a bookstore, with a schedule that varied day by day as well as week by week, and just being near her Alternative Lifestyle made me feel like I was peering over the edge of someone’s too-high-up roofdeck. I could imagine myself knowing it was time to leave for work, putting it off in my room, getting there late or not at all. To me, the positive peer pressure of a standard schedule wasn’t an inhibitor, it was a necessary seatbelt. 

I was in New York City this past week, starting a new job, and I had dinner with my former rowhouse roommate. I told her over udon noodles that while I hated the slow process of onboarding, I already felt the play-pretend spark at work. In fact, I’d scheduled our dinner at 5:30pm on purpose, to make sure I left my desk on time and started my job with good habits and boundaries. She shook her head, laughing, at how a part of me longs to stay late at my desk, even though it would make most of me miserable. I told her how, on my best days at work, I feel so much momentum building that I feel like I’m actually in motion, wind blowing back my hair as my desk picks up speed. It’s the structure that makes me feel successful, the endorphin hit of each checked-off item so strong that if I do something unplanned, I’ll add it to the list just so I can check it off.  

I thought a lot about this over the summer, when I had a few months between jobs. It’s been twenty years since I declined to take a gap year before college, and those few months this past summer are the longest structure-free time I’ve taken since. While I’m sad to leave the endless possibility of those work-free days, I admit to also feeling some relief in my core. It’s never fun forcing myself out of bed in the morning, but it can be hard governing my squishy-centered self on my own. I hope to haver more time between jobs in the future, and maybe even retirement one day. In the meantime, I’ll embrace the silver lining of my need to work for a living, pouring myself into my working schedule and finding a kind of comfort in its confines.

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