At the end of July I’m finishing my Day Job teaching English in Japan with the JET Program, and the transition has given me a lot to think about. This is the second in a multi-part series about working on JET, what it’s brought me, how I feel about it, and where I’m headed in the future. You can check out Part 1 here.
The cover photo shows an actual girls elementary school (which later became Tanaka elementary school) in my town of Namerikawa, Toyama, from the early- to mid-20th century.
As I wrote about last week, I really like my job teaching English with the JET Program, but it’s time for me to move on. Besides some problems with one of my co-teachers and not being able to see family and friends in the States, there’s one really, really important reason for my leaving that deserved its own post:
It’s time for me to focus more on creative work, and not on Day Job work.
Is the JET Program a Day Job for You?
Short answer: Kind of. Long answer:
When I first started this blog I wrote about Day Jobs as a relatively mindless or easy way creative people could earn money to pay their bills, especially when their creative pursuits weren’t paying enough or at all. At the time I had a Day Job working in a greenhouse where I spent a lot of time putting dirt into pots, counting plant leaves, and measuring chemicals, none of which were particularly demanding or mentally intensive.
After that I worked as a test-grader and writing web copy for electronics at a company where the boss was crooked. Neither of these jobs were particularly intensive either, and both left me with plenty of energy and time to work on creative work.
This Day Job period covered about three years from 2015 to 2018. During that time, I got pretty sick of Day Job work, particularly because putting dirt into pots didn’t pay very much, online test-grading kind of destroyed my brain, and I felt serious moral repercussions working in the office with the crooked boss.
This sparked my search for a Day Job (or some sort of in-between version of a Day Job and a Career) that I would actually enjoy, and that would pay enough to help me finally pay off my student loans. And that’s what led me back to Japan, and to JET.
Again, as I wrote about last week, I enjoy my job on JET and gain a tremendous amount of fulfillment from it, though I also took it for the purely Day Job-reason of needing to pay bills and get back out into the world.
My Priorities Changed Once I Paid Off My Debt
In October of 2019 I achieved a pretty big milestone when I paid off every single piece of my debt—even my 0% credit cards that technically weren’t costing me anything. It took me sixteen years to do this, and adjusting to a world where I could actually save money instead of worrying about debt was kind of a shock. Afterward I didn’t know how to feel about money, or my life goals, for a long time.
Since then I’ve been saving money—like, a pretty big percentage of what I earn, since it’s so cheap for me to live here in Toyama on the JET salary and my subsidized housing. In total I have about $45,000 saved right now, and this has given me a lot of confidence I didn’t have in earlier times when I was worrying about the future.
Having that savings has helped me think not in terms of what I have to do, but what I want to do.
Teaching English is Great, But It’s Not What I Want to Do—Like, Forever
Imagine that you’re a person who really likes reading books. You like all kinds of books, but your favorite kind of book is definitely Terrorist Political Thrillers. If you were forced to limit yourself to reading one kind of book for the rest of your life, it would be Terrorist Political Thrillers, and you know that for sure.
However, you also like reading plenty of other kinds of books, and reading these other books is really important to you, since you don’t want to only read Terrorist Political Thrillers.
Now imagine that among your other reading ventures, you have a chance to read a lot of Dystopian Fantasy novels, which you also really love. You have a great time with the Dystopian Fantasy Novels, and feel really satisfied reading them, but of course you keep reading Terrorist Political Thrillers because you still love those books the most.
After a while, though, you notice that you don’t have as much time to read Terrorist Political Thrillers as you’d like. At first you think maybe this is just temporary, but then when the feeling doesn’t go away it starts to bother you. In addition to Terrorist Political Thrillers and Dystopian Fantasy, you also keep busy reading other books too: Cozy Mysteries, Paranormal Romance, High Fantasy, and even a Louis L’Amour-style Western every once and a while.
You want to make more time for reading Terrorist Political Thrillers, but it’s hard to know what to give up. You could give up the Paranormal Romance or the Louis L’Amour, but since you don’t read these books very often, it wouldn’t create much time at all. The Dystopian Fantasy novels that you really enjoy, though, also take up a LOT of your time, and you can’t just read a little bit of Dystopian Fantasy because the books are so long and have a lot of sequels.
Eventually you start to feel bitter about Dystopian Fantasy for taking up so much of your time—and you feel guilty about that bitterness. You begin to dream about not having to read so much Dystopian Fantasy anymore and having more time, not for only Terrorist Political Thrillers, but for other kinds of books too—and this makes you feel excited about the future again in a way you didn’t before.
In case you missed the metaphor, being a writer of novels is the Terrorist Political Thrillers, while Dystopian Fiction is the the JET program. I enjoy it tremendously, but it’s not what I really want to do. And meanwhile, I don’t have enough time to work on my new novel, or on preparing to market my first one when it comes out next April.
I’ve always known that I wanted to write more, but now that I have the financial resources, I have to figure out how to do that, and what a writer’s life could look like over the long-term.
Leaving a Job You Like Is Really Hard
I want to stress this point because it’s not one that I’ve had to deal with very often. I’ve had plenty of jobs I’ve liked that ended naturally (for example, because I graduated and couldn’t work in the Bennington admissions office anymore), and I’ve had plenty of jobs that I didn’t like that I was desperate to get out of, like my old office job.
Both of these situations were kind of easy to deal with mentally. When you have a job you like, though, and you leave it to do something else you like more, that’s really hard.
And maybe it’s that kind of difficult choice that helps us grow as people. By not making those choices you can just kind of coast along, never taking the next step, and missing out on a lot of what life has to offer.
There’s one other, very specific aspect of the JET Program that I’ve outgrown and that isn’t working for me the way it used to. This is something I’ve wanted to blog about for three years (!) and specifically kept a secret, and I’ll be talking about it in Part 3!