When did you lose your “fire in the belly”?

At my previous non-journalism job, I lost most of my motivation when my manager fired my best friend there.

 

A common theme I'm noticing here: If you get along with and respect your co-workers, it covers a lot of shortcomings in your job (pay, working odd hours, being understaffed).

I never thought I would be at my current shop for 10-plus years, but here I am. There's a good group that is hanging on with me, and I'd like to think I'm still inspired to do good work ... or at least to keep the paper from being a total embarrassment.

Although it was difficult, my wife and I made the work/family balance happen and we have two kids in college now. Everything else I get out of my newspaper career, at this point, is just gravy.

 

I still remember when I lost my fire. It was a 6 a.m. preseason practice for the football team I covered. It was my seventh season on the beat and at that practice I just realized that I didn't give much of a shit anymore. While I was still turning out good stuff most days (I think), in some ways it just felt like the same thing I'd done the year before that and the year before that. And I hadn't had a raise in five years, with nothing coming on the horizon. It dawned on me that steamy morning: I don't have to keep doing this.

The next day I told my SE that I'd finish out the season and then go on my way. Best decision I've ever made. I still write for a living, still tell stories, but I could never go back to the grind of being a beat writer.

 

There was a series of things that made the fire less intense.

But what finally put it out happened somewhere in the neighborhood of one year ago today when the company accused me of lying about my hours on my time card. Salaried people filled out sheets every two weeks and you were to put down the hours you worked each day and total it up.

Someone higher up in the chain apparently decided salaried people in various places were working fewer hours than they were claiming — and they decided I was one of them. I heard about it while in the middle of working another 55-hour week.

And that was it. That day that I realized that no matter how hard I worked and how well I worked, there was going to be some corporate asshole somewhere who was going to believe that I wasn't doing it right or well enough or hard enough and be determined to make my life miserable.

I resigned the following Monday. I don't want to work in media ever again.

 

I have not lost the fire, but I have become more aware that the intensity of that flames wanes or grows depending on the fuel available, be it from more internal ingenuity or from outside inspiration.

I just seem to be wired to create as a response to what I encounter in life.

What I have lost is the hearth that journalism provided for that fire. It helped focus the heat and was a gathering place for those seeking warmth. It helped provide a purpose for the burn.

I’ve been without that scale of creative outlet for almost three years and am still in search of a new hearth, most likely not in journalism. I sometimes churn away at my current not-as-creative-as-I-would-like job in search of fuel and perhaps energetically blowtorch those opportunities as compensation.

I don’t really think I will ever lose that fire, it just burns in less focused and far less productive ways.

 

I came to it late in life and it was a dream come true until it wasn't.

The day it felt like work was the day I had to write an obituary for someone young enough to be my child.
Then people who should know better talked about the situation as if the deceased had it coming because he played hockey for a living.
Two weeks later, I got an email from my ME asking me to write another one, and...

Still saying it years later: Our fun shouldn't have a body count.

 

Lost mine this week. Really. This week. Some point Monday morning. Maybe yesterday.

25 years in... and, this week, I found that I just don't care much anymore.

Passed over for a promotion last week (to the "big" job) and told it's because they don't want to risk taking me off the current shift. That actually DOES make some financial sense as my shift is highly-profitable. Still, getting passed over for someone from out of town stinks. People ask me every day and have for 6 months, "are you getting (so-and-so's) job? Hope you do." Won a bunch of awards over the last five years, best in state for this and that, blah blah blah... and none of it mattered for this.

Now I don't have a mountain to climb here at work anymore after 10+ years here of kissing ass, coming in early, learning the new skills, mentoring crappy co-workers and, frankly, keeping us from getting sued or humiliated in nearly every newscast.

The bright side is that now I can finally say "no" to requests from management instead of running and asking "how high?"

It also hit me during a run yesterday. Had just run 5 or 6 miles, into the cool down after an hour of running and I got a Facebook message from a viewer who just torched me for how I do my job. Just pretty vile.

All I thought was, "when is it time to just go drive a big rig for a few years and get away from it all?" That's after living in the "public square" for a while and I, generally, keep a thick skin.

Look... I'm paid well, they've always accommodated my family life and I'm appreciative. I'm just now starting to look for an escape valve.

 

Hang in there, my friend.

I've found over the years that a moment like this often precedes great, productive change.

 

This week, I'm looking much more at macro.

Not at "getting out" -- the money is too good -- but some small steps to forge a new path.

The sports betting service... I totally should... but, damn, I can't go there with my crappy picks this year

 

I never really lost the fire, journalism-wise, at the time, although I have now. It was more taken from me. I wasn't given a choice in the matter, and it reached a point that I simply had to move on. So I did/was forced to.

I'd never looked at this thread before. For some reason, I couldn't bring myself to do it, and besides, I didn't think I had much to bring to it. Still, I'd always wondered what it said, and finally, just now, I looked.

Good thread.