I quit my job today. I do not have another one lined up, and before getting this job I was out of work for months. I know quite a few people struggling to find work. It doesn’t feel like a smart thing to do, but I was miserable at work. The kind of totalizing miserable feeling that creates dissociation during the workday and persists in my body the way the intensity of a noxious fume lives on as a headache.

I am experiencing this as a setback, as a blow, and as a destabilization of my self-image. Part of my self-image has been that when push comes to shove, I can do anything I have to. Another important part of that self-image is that when faced with a set of choices, I make the smartest and most pragmatic choice.

I feel uncomfortable because over the past few years I have felt myself being pushed away from the zone of easily identifiable pragmatic choices. At every step, I think I have been making rational, good choices, with appropriate sized risks. And yet, I am struggling in a way that I didn’t imagine that I would. If I’m being forced to make riskier choices, what do I hope to gain?