My daughter’s nanny called in sick.
I had my day all planned and mapped out. A full to-do list for that day, but the list did not survive to even 8 a.m. Being in the PR industry, I am very familiar with this feeling. However, instead of feeling a sense of dread about how I would get it all done, I felt excited. Excited that I got to spend time with my daughter instead of being behind a computer.
So I put my daughter in the car, drove into town, and left my computer at home.
Working in PR means you are always reachable
I came up in public relations, and a prerequisite for the job is being reachable. You have your agency touch base on Monday morning and leave with a plan for the week. By Tuesday, the plan is usually gone because a client has news, a problem, or a new opportunity lands on your desk, and everything else gets pushed.
You have billable hours to hit on every account, and if you don’t hit them inside a normal week, you find the hours somewhere else. Mine were usually after dinner. Ten years ago, during the end-of-month reporting, one week a month, my evenings were filled with grabbing screenshots, finding associated Unique Views per Month, and all that.
When a client has a crisis in the middle of the night, nobody has to tell you to pick up. You just do. I was good at the work. That was most of the problem.
We left Dallas and moved to a farm
The first time I stepped out of that current was in 2020. My husband and I left Dallas, where I had every professional reason to stay, and bought a small farm in East Texas. I kept the same job. It was a good job, good people, and benefits most people would want, and I did it from a place where you swapped concrete sidewalks for literal cattle trails, fluffy cows, and chickens.
That part worked. Then I had my daughter, and the choice got made.
I didn’t leave the workforce because I fell in love with my baby and lost interest in working. I loved my professional self, and still do. The real story is that I wanted to work, but what changed was who I wanted to do it for.
My husband was home six days a week because, years before that, he’d built something he could control. I was home two. He hadn’t worked less than I. He’d just built the thing that got to decide when he works and when he doesn’t.
There’s no villain in this story. My ambition and my employer’s ambition just stopped pointing in the same direction. When you’re not writing your own check, you don’t get to be the person who fixes that, even if you have the title that should support that.
So I left. No agency waiting, no book of business, no plan past figuring it out as I go.
The thing my 25-year-old self would find insane isn’t that I quit. It’s what I do now with the work that comes to me.
I keep things intentional now
People email me most weeks wanting help at the intersection of affiliate and PR. I keep a few clients I enjoy working with, but honestly hand most referrals to friends in the industry. I refer away more business now, even without a salary, than I ever imagined turning down when I had one. In PR, good clients don’t throw money at you. The work can often be hard to come by. Giving it away on purpose isn’t something anyone taught me.
The calls I keep are intentional. For now, they’re the publicist and agency consulting clients that light me on fire. I finish those calls with more energy than when I started. Nothing at an agency ever did that. It’s still work. But it’s fulfilling work when you see the puzzle pieces start to click for students and clients.
In my 20s, I wanted a great title, to own accounts of my own, and my name on a 30 under 30 list. I got some of that, and none of it changed the pride of ownership like fulfillment does. The view from up there turned out to be the same, only with a constant stream of stress-relief tips on my FYP.
I didn’t get less ambitious. I stopped assuming that ambition and escalation were the same as my definition of success.
Now I’m learning things I’m bad at, which is uncomfortable when you’re used to being the one with the answers. I can also process a chicken I raised and have it on a plate by dinner, which my Dallas self would have found completely unhinged. Truth be told, you need to let it set for a few days for the best texture. Ask me how I know! Ha.
And when the nanny is sick on a Tuesday, I can be unreachable. The work is still there on Wednesday.
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