I am not going to start this post talking about how I’m sitting in a coffee shop, because damned if a quick scroll through my last several posts didn’t show me that’s almost exclusively what I write about.

If you follow me on Instagram or speak to me on even a sort-of regular basis, you’ll know about my fairly big news. I mentioned last time I wrote that there was some potentially really exciting stuff going on. Usually that’s almost a guarantee that said really exciting stuff will immediately implode and lead nowhere at all, but I’m here to tell you that THIS time, the opposite has happened.

One week ago today was my last day as a retail manager.

MIND. BLOWN.

I promised myself in 2019, somewhere in-between ringing up customers and getting sale stickers stuck on my arm at the Anthropologie in Spitalfields, that it would be my last Christmas in retail. Christmas 2020 did see me in a shop (or it would have, if we’d been allowed to be open), but I wouldn’t quite call it retail, since my role at UAL helped me vastly expand my skillset and provided so many opportunities outside of working a salesfloor (and, COVID or no COVID, it was 9a-5p, Mon-Fri). I didn’t immediately think I’d be breaking my word when I joined back up with World Market last May, but when I took a store manager position in Santa Cruz in June, it did seem a bit like the death knell of that promise nearly two years past.

Nothing extraordinarily bad happened while I was in Santa Cruz. It just served as a reminder of how nothing about retail had changed, but holy shit, I certainly had. I kept looking at my resume and how close I had been to achieving something different with my career. At the end of July, I decided enough was enough. I started applying elsewhere.

By the end of August, I’d gotten nowhere. The holiday season was closing fast, and so one Sunday, out of respect for my district manager – who I’ve known for nearly a decade – I made myself a new promise. Christmas 2021 would be my last in the business and I needed to do the right thing and wait until the new year to pursue another job. And because life is life, roughly 24 hours after I made myself that promise, I heard back from a job application I’d sent out the week prior for easily the dreamiest and most ideal of any of the jobs I had applied for.

When I wrote last, I was two interviews in and a week away from hearing that I got the job. I write this now having finished my first full week as an Experience & Program Coordinator at a historic house and garden. So it’s been a really nice seven days, even if I am still in disbelief half the time.

Of all of the amazing things that have happened in those seven days, one of my favorites happened yesterday when I was walking to my car with my new manager. She was asking me how everything was going, and said she hoped it hadn’t been too overwhelming for a first week. I told her that at the risk of continuing to gush about this job (shockingly, I have already gushed quite a lot), I couldn’t be happier. I gave her an abbreviated version of how relieved I was to feel like I’ve finally found a role and career path I can settle into without having to constantly wonder what’s next, because I’m so unsure. She turned to me and said, “Yes! Roots. It’s so great when you finally get to start putting them down.”

I thought immediately of what I wrote last January, a very wild nine months ago, about roots. The exhaustion of the what’s next and my inability to do anything but feed that vision. But I think, dare I say it, I’ve sorted out that rootless self.

And now it’s time to get a little nest-y.

I’ve started drinking more tea than coffee again, I’ve hung stuff on the walls, I’ve started to build a home with another person. Please stay tuned for more of the total craziness that is the fact that my life, for once, will not be so crazy anymore. I’m thirty-two, chill, and pretty fucking thrilled about it.