The day job narrative. What would your manuscript look like?

revisiting the constraints of working roles and their potential to reshape identity

I have many thoughts (new and old) on the value of writing about day jobs.

I run a podcast at my job in academia, where I recently I mispronounced an interviewee’s company name (which we didn’t catch till after the fact). When I suggested I rerecord the introduction to patch in, the sound engineer sent back a file of my voice with it corrected.

“I stole your soul,” he joked.

He’d taken 2 minutes to feed my voice into an AGI model that recreated the entire intro with a “cleaned up” version of “me” introducing the guest I’d met in person.

The AGI can replicate my voice and redo an intro, but it can’t capture anything worthwhile. In fact, the topic of personal voice and artificial intelligence is driving me back to reading more memoirs and craving more personal story. Memoir has always been my favorite genre anyway because reality is strange, and I find that even the worst memoirs are fascinating.

AGI can tell redundant, unoriginal stories, but it can’t tell your story, not the story of emotional truths and textures and positions and personas. It can’t capture the human journey of searching for self.

My very human story is about work, as you may know, and this is a sneak peek of its cover (thank you, Cornerstone Press UWSP — this will be out in ‘27, so this is an early glimpse).

I wrote about work because I’ve had a lot of jobs, and I found myself reaching for something at each.

From my first foray into the working world as a bagger at a grocery store to a short stint selling fine jewelry to bussing tables early mornings at a breakfast diner, the writer in me has always been collecting material and imagining the next best thing.

I’ve worked at a large corporate firm and a small nonprofit. I’ve worked in dance clubs and Sam’s Club (though I never wrote about Sam’s - I sold OdoBan in the aisles to passersby [note to self: write about this]).

All these decades later, I am a business owner, writer, and academic program manager whose voice is being replicated by AGI.

As you can probably deduce, I am well beyond the 21+ category above. Part of this is because long before it was the only option, I was a gig worker. I often had 2 or 3 positions at once and participated in more orientations than I’d like to admit. Each was a study of self and the world.

I remember sitting in rooms participating in this phenomenon known as "orientation” and feeling so much potential. I love the word and its inherent possibility. The dictionary definition states that it is about determining the relative position of someone or something. At work, it’s about a person’s position within a system.

We orient to new environments as humans in a far-from-robotic way. As humans, we are messy and often either over or underconfident, which makes new starts both exhilarating and anxiety-producing. And each time, at least for established industries—even the arts—a specific role seems attached to a desired persona. For a writer, or creative mind, this means possibility. This means we can imagine what we want.

If you’re in sales, you will almost always benefit from displaying charisma and enthusiasm. If you are an expert, you are expected to share a lot about a single topic and carry a certain weight to your words. If you are a teacher, you are tasked with knowledge sharing in a way that is equal parts nurturing and disciplinarian.

If you’re an artist or writer, you are often expected to cultivate a captivating persona to sell your work. Persona can stem from our identity as well as the identity we attach to the work we choose to share, but it’s often only a small window into the artist’s true self.

I grew up thinking adopting an artistic persona meant owning pet alligators or lobsters, having drinking problems, engaging in mysterious downward glances often, being surrounded by impenetrable cliques, and wearing either the latest fashion labels or only thrift-bought clothing. Seeing as how I am a sweatpants and sneakers kind of person, this version of a persona felt like the opposite of authenticity.

Creating a persona for work, even artistic work, is often something that happens without us even realizing. It’s ego doing ego’s thing.

It’s survival, connectivity, and familiarity. And it often earns us a sense of belonging or safety in a space where we spend many of our most alert waking hours. But I believe it’s also necessary to keep a safe distance from that persona, so we can always have enough wiggle room to adjust and realign. Or reorient.

For most of my working life, finding identity in a day job was a losing game, and as much as I’d probably have enough pension to retire in ten years if I’d stayed at one place, I wouldn’t give up the wild experiences I’ve had.

I liked being an outsider at jobs I disliked because I never got too attached to the wrong situation, and it taught me more about myself and others than comfort ever could. I learned that belonging in a space that is not right will never feel rewarding, no matter how hard we try to make it work. So throughout my teens and twenties, even in my early thirties, I treated each role as a case study, and I’m glad I did. And now that I’m an artist, I’m satisfied to align my persona with whatever work is at hand.

Paths are made by walking. —Kafka

Our ultimate career or vocation can be rewarding. The day jobs and gigs and projects we do to fulfill expectations or survive offer us something else: clear and poignant insight into what we don’t want, do want, never want, and why.

There is so much a lackluster job, in particular, can teach us that can’t be learned second-hand, through simulation or the classroom.

I’m thinking of putting together a class on how to write about day jobs before my book is released. I think it could apply to any genre, because I think there are a lot of interesting entry points for this material. It’s worth meditating about how, across experiences, our identity shifts, even if slightly, from role to role. The way people see us changes, and this can often change the way we see ourselves. When we realize this, however, we can see the ego for just what it is: an actor in need of a role.

Where have we been most aligned with our working persona? Where have we felt unable to abide? These questions get to our essence.

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Writing prompt: What did the role, the way you dressed, the shift, the breaks, the expectations, and the lighting do to your sense of comfort or belonging, and how did your leader get it right or fail miserably?

This is a fun exercise, and one I’m finding adapts well to fiction. I hope you’ll try it. Disclaimer: It’s a lot easier to dissect roles and work that reside in your past.

If you’ve ever written about day jobs or plan to, tell me about it. If you’d like to read one of mine, go here.

If you want a breath practice with a dose of mindfulness fix (esp. after that personal story), go here. Our next Creative Resiliency circle will be posted soon.

And if you missed my Wham! Bam! Thank You! Slam! performance, watch away. My story of voting actually starts whilst walking from one job to the next.

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