Can you fly? I can.

A double espresso, a dry erase marker, and a realization.

I don’t know if it was the double shot of espresso or the adrenaline rush of a 3:45am wake up.

Energy pulsed through me.

My fingers flew across the dry erase board, ears pricked to catch not the words, but the values coming out. I was giving the marker all it could handle - arrows, underlines, exclamation marks.

I stepped back for a second, smiling as I saw the individual pieces become a vision in real time. This was something we could build.

This was joy.

Much of my writing on The Joy Luck Club has been dedicated to finding joy in my personal life. Or, at all, really. But, work is so wound up in that for me that I forget to clarify the edges between the two.

I haven’t always felt joy at work. Growing up, my mom worked three jobs to make sure our house remained ours and to subsidize her horrific financial decisions. Since I was fourteen, there has never been a time when I haven’t worked. Not even the day I delivered my daughter.

And yet, I am not a workaholic. I truly do not relish exhaustion.

Sure, there’s the whole scarcity mindset thing that has me constantly terrified I’ll lose everything and end up under a bridge with a shopping cart. That’s an…errr…motivator, for sure. But, it’s not just that. It’s that sometimes, there are these moments when I feel like I’m flying. When my brain picks up speed, pulling pieces from worlds previously disconnected, and pulling them into the now, the present, to become…a thing.

I spent years trying to figure out how to describe what I do. The place I go when an idea is presented to me, and I step up to the board with my marker, and come out with a parakeet, a product, and a plan. Maybe its flow state, maybe its a transcendental experience, maybe its just the one skill I’ve honed hopping industries on my way to Candyland.

I don’t know what it is, but to me, it feels like joy.

I’ve never been a big idea person. My first instinct when I hear a big idea is to pick apart all of the reasons why it won’t work. Trust me, I recognize how unpopular I am in the room. For a long time, I didn’t understand why I did that. I didn’t want to be Negative Nelly, but despite all of the enthusiasm from the head nodders of the group, I just couldn’t get on the band wagon. Turns out, it wasn’t because most of the ideas were bad. It’s because there was nothing but the idea. The trick was to get everyone jazzed about the idea itself before anyone started asking “but how?” or, more importantly, “but why?”

Me…at the Big Idea brainstorming

You see, most big ideas don’t fail. They don’t ever get off the ground at all.

So when someone comes to me and says, “Here’s my big idea. Will you help me think it through?” That, that my friends is my most favoritest job of all. That is when Negative Nelly transforms into Just Do It Jessica because I know that is where Joy will find me at work.

When I talk to people about my career change, going from working in biotech to the publishing and creative media industries, I think the perception is that it happened everywhere, all at once. The reality is I’ve been tinkering for a long time - amassing skills, staying curious, bending my “Yes’s” to the work that falls in that space between ideation and implementation. Looking for opportunities where there’s a runway, a plane, and a pilot and what they’re looking for is a competent crew to get them off the ground.

I didn’t switch careers on purpose. I switched jobs until I found my purpose.

When I was a Clinical Research Manager, a job I loathed, I cried in the parking lot more days than not gearing myself up for the walk inside. My role involved overseeing protocol visits for patients enrolled in clinical research trials. These were often multi-year studies, so, I got to know our patients well. While performing an EKG one day, my patient started asking me about my work. What I liked about it, if it was fulfilling. I must have made enough noises without words because he finally said, “You hate it, don’t you?”

I didn’t quite cop to the hate since I needed the job, and he was a patient, but I sidestepped by saying, “I’m not sure what else I would like more.” He told me that at his first job one of his tasks was taking all of the FedEx and UPS boxes to the mail drop each night. He told a hilarious story of him navigating an overflowing cart down the hall, into an elevator, down eighteen flights, to the outside loading dock and then shlepping boxes to the drop site. I’ll be honest. It didn’t sound too horrible, and I said as much.

It’s the teamwork poster on the wall that gets me…🤣

“That,” he said, “is the point. To you, it may have been no big deal. To me, it was Hell. When I left that job I swore that no matter what other job I took, I would never, EVER have the FedEx drop be part of my responsibilities again. Sometimes, you have to back into what your perfect job is, and that’s okay. But be clear about what you don’t want. It will help you figure out what you do.”

I have a list on my computer to this day of tasks I will never EVER do again. Not because they are beneath me, but because they steal my joy.

I sound so confident when I talk about joy at work, don’t I? Reading this back, I’m like, “Fuck, I actually sound like I have this figured out.” What’s funny is that I’ve been on the floor more times about work than I have about life. I just know how to fake it better there.

And that makes me sad. Because its okay for me to dismantle my guts publicly when the story is about finding joy through death, disaster, or darkness. But for some reason, I need to feel competent when I talk about work.

Maybe I have learned something about how to find the joy in my work, how to invite it in, how to say an unequivocal “No” (without the “thank you”) to tasks or projects or people that steal my joy. But that all came from crawling around on the canyon floor too. I had to learn to look up to find Joy handing me scraps of my career one by one, finally helping me piece together something that makes sense.

The process is the same whether its work or life. You stop digging down so you can climb up. You often walk away from what you don’t want first until you learn how to navigate towards Joy. There’s a lot of falling down, getting dirty, swearing, and general misery. And then the sun rises, you realize you get to do it again, and some days that starts to feel like a gift instead of a torment. Joy is with you, always. I mean, yes, sometimes that bitch runs away and you have to chase her. She’s excellent at Hide and Seek, but she won’t give up on you, and she’s good about giving clues if you ask for them.

So, if you’re reading this and the thing that’s been destroying you isn’t life but work, I’m sorry I neglected to include that until now. I kinda see it as all the same thing, but standing next to that whiteboard I was reminded that it is…and it isn’t.

So, where does Joy find you at work?

When do you feel like you’re flying?

Or maybe you haven’t left the ground lately. Why not?

Tell me your story. I’m listening.