If there’s a surprise gift that keeps giving when it comes to being a full-time staff writer for a website after ~13 years of being a freelancer, it’s that I have paid holidays and paid time-off for the first time in a long time. I am, I confess, unsure quite what to do with this new and wonderful experience.
It’s not as if I didn’t know this was part of the whole deal; I mean, I was paying attention to the job offer, and can read, I promise. It’s simply that my brain sped past that when weighing up the pros and cons of taking the gig, in favor of things like “a guaranteed wage every month that is unlikely to fluctuate wildly through no fault of my own” and “health benefits, no really, health benefits, can you imagine?” All of this was happening at the beginning of the summer, far enough away from everything bar July 4 (and even then, it was going to take effect after then), so holidays and what they’d mean for me just wasn’t something even vaguely on my radar.
Now, of course, things are different: not only am I about to get to take Thanksgiving off without being thankful for losing the money that I could be making otherwise for the first time in… well, 13 years, I guess, but I’m also facing down the start of the holiday season knowing that I get to take basically half of the month off at the end because Chloe’s family are in town and, again, I don’t have to worry about losing money as a result. On the one hand, I feel somewhat shocked at this turn of events; on the other, I feel as if I’ve accidentally slipped into a far more cultured, kind world that doesn’t punish me for wanting a life outside of “content creation.”
That said, the problem with full time jobs is that they find whole other ways to punish you, but that’s neither here nor there right now…