How Success Made Me Question My Worth

As a well-paid film professional, I have my dream career. So why do I look back with longing at my receptionist days?

Jan Peeter Verdussen’s Merry Company Having a Picnic in a Wide River Landscape via Wikimedia Commons.

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Editor’s note: “Time is money,” we’re told again and again. But what happens when the money time earns starts to feel more valuable than your life outside of work? How do you allow yourself to relax in a world of increasing economic precarity, when one false move could unravel it all? In this beautiful and insightful essay, Caitlin Dixon explores these questions—and her own struggle to believe she has earned her leisure time. — Sara Eckel

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When I was a lower-middle-class kid in mid-Michigan, my family didn’t travel. “Going on vacation” meant piling into the station wagon to drive to our Pittsburgh cousins’ house. I can still smell the sulfuric steel mills as we approached the outskirts of town, and the greasy simmer of corned beef on my aunt’s harvest-gold electric stove.

To go anywhere else, I needed art. Ska records brought me to working-class London; Edith Wharton, to turn-of-the-century New York. Our local arthouse cinema cracked open the world even more. I watched Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven as a teenage film buff, munching on popcorn and leaning into the creaky seats. I loved the gorgeous magic-hour cinematography and the heartbreaking depiction of 1916 migrant farmworkers. 

In one scene, a wealthy farmer with a crush on one of his migrant workers invites her family to spend the day with him. The tagalong younger sister, accustomed to back-breaking work, can hardly believe that she gets to spend a leisurely afternoon picnicking by the river. She blurts in voiceover, “I’m telling you, the rich got it figured out.” 

I laughed out loud. If only we poors would just have the right idea, we, too, could live as the rich! It’s a failure of imagination, not of cold hard cash. But I related to the kid. I wanted a better life. 

I pursued it in the classic American way. Through loans and grants, I went to college and graduate school—a path that led to the career I have now. I’m a professional film editor with a respectable list of IMDb credits, and I make more money than that little Michigander would have thought possible.

And yet, I still don’t feel like I “have it figured out.” I own a lovely but modest house with my husband, and we’re both diligent savers. But I am still plagued by a working-class girl’s anxiety, the worry that there will never be enough, that it could all come tumbling down with one false move.

The strange part is, there was a period in my life when I felt relatively free of money worries—and it was a time when I was paid next to nothing. In the 1990s, I worked temp and receptionist jobs in San Francisco, answering phones and signing for packages in the pre-internet era. I didn’t have much money, but rent was cheap, which gave me great swaths of free time.

My friends and I would throw together dinner parties at short notice. For one, we pored through a 1970s Good Housekeeping for hilariously horrendous party trends, like fashioning a pineapple out of olives and a block of cheese. On weekends, my friend Ying would call with a list of parties he’d somehow uncovered, and we’d pile into the back of his Buick to dance in the homes of strangers. We’d put on makeshift poetry readings. I’d take the bus to the ocean with my Super 8 camera pressed to the window, filming a city ever more blanketed in fog. We saw bands; we kissed boys; we made art. I traveled and loafed around, earning enough to survive and then taking copious time off to do whatever I liked.

But at a certain point, a switch flipped in my brain, and I no longer felt like I was able to take time off from work—or even just work a normal eight-hour shift. Instead, I grinded away for upwards of 10 hours a day, eating dinner at my desk. I spent weekends lying on the couch, too exhausted to accept invitations from friends.

The problem wasn’t that I had failed to become a successful professional. The problem was that I succeeded.

The early stages of my film career were thrilling.

During my receptionist days, I had wondered if my lifelong love for movies could, maybe, be the germ of a career. On a whim, I took a film class at San Francisco State. I found the “zone”—a zenlike focus that is the editor’s holy grail—while splicing together short strips of Super 8 film that I’d cut with a tiny guillotine and adhere with specialty tape. Eventually, I went on to get a master’s in film production. 

After grad school, I was so thrilled to have landed a post-production job that I didn’t mind my grueling first years as an assistant editor, working for a pittance before my second shift at a law firm, typing depositions to make rent. When I graduated to full editor, I didn’t take it for granted. I took any job I could to prove my place in that world. It was, and still is, a joy to dig for the shots that will land a story. I’d come in early and stay late—to be a good worker, and because it was fun. 

When I collapsed at the end of a job, it seemed normal. Like most everyone else in my industry, my work is freelance and project-based, so the gigs inevitably end. The hours are long and there is no job security, sick time or health insurance (my sector of the industry isn’t unionized). The tradeoff is that when I work, I get a decent paycheck. It doesn’t make me rich, but it’s enough to recognize my good fortune. In between gigs, I could restore—take hikes, write books, lounge in coffee shops or on beaches—the way I did when I was a receptionist. 

Yet as I climbed higher up the income scale, I felt more and more reluctant to take time off. Instead, I fixated on how much I’d lose if I took a break. To give up a week of a low salary was inconsequential. But a week, two weeks, a month off at a higher salary was a large chunk of change. 

Is this rest worth it? I’d ask. Am I sufficiently maximizing the relaxation value of my week away?

What changed? 

I can attribute some of the problem to the precarity of work in my industry, and my own underlying insecurity as someone who grew up in a family that didn’t have very much. But I also think there is a wider problem at work here.

The first clue came to me in 2017, when my cohort and I were falling apart in the wake of Trump’s election, scrambling to understand how our fellow citizens could have elected an orange-haired autocrat. In the great tradition of middle-aged white ladies casting about for solutions, we started a book club.

We read Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom. Written after World War II, the book explores how the insecurity of the modern world leaves us vulnerable to strongmen. Fromm explains that in the Middle Ages, there was no freedom to move between classes or even jobs—no shift from middle-class Midwesterner to coastal film professional. But within those limitations, you had a secure place in society, and a guild protecting your interests. And the rich weren’t walled off. They employed the local tradesmen, and their riches were held in check by a church that deemed greed a sin.

But when trade routes opened up in the 16th century, a rich man could travel across seas and get more money than he’d ever dreamed of. This severed his ties to home, and the limits imposed by the church. Without his place in a community, he needed to protect his hoard from rivals who threatened his newfound riches:

[The rich] used their power and wealth to squeeze the last ounce of pleasure out of life; but in doing so, they had to use ruthlessly every means, from physical torture to psychological manipulation, to rule over the masses and to check their competitors … the successful individual’s relation to his own self, his sense of security and confidence were poisoned too.

They had more than ever, but were more insecure about it: They’d given up their place in a community, and what they’d gained could just as easily be lost. In their efforts to conquer this new world, they had to become ruthless and single-minded, lest they be vulnerable to competition, or peers who might steal from them.

I scribbled in the margins: “Why am I relating to 16th-century burghers?”

It’s not that I was worried that some other person would face me in battle, whack me with a sword and steal my savings. The person I feared was stealing from me was … me.

Reading Fromm helped me pinpoint the moment I flipped from chilled-out poor person to stressed-out professional. In June 2003, I was accepted to a writing retreat: free lodging in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s barn, with chef-prepared meals each evening. All you had to do was write.

Two days before my departure, I found an apartment for sale in my Brooklyn neighborhood, just barely in my price range. I’d upgrade from my tiny rental, but in order to buy it, I’d have to spend the month on the phone with mortgage brokers and home inspectors, possibly leaving the retreat entirely to sign papers and deal with movers. It would wreck the whole point of the retreat. I’ll wait a month, I thought. I’ll find another apartment. What’s the harm?

You likely know what happened next. As I scribbled in Edna’s barn, the property market went crazy. When I returned a month later, not only was that apartment gone, but it and similar apartments had shot up in price, sometimes double and triple what I’d been considering paying. 

That summer was the beginning of a shift in how many of us started consider housing. No longer were homes simply places to live; they became investments—pathways to security and wealth if you had one, impossibly distant if you didn’t. Through the light of Fromm’s 16th-century burghers, vast riches were now available. But getting them required lightning-fast reflexes, a pile of capital, and sink-or-swim ruthlessness. Snagging a house in many cases became a high-wire dance, fueled by panic. If you missed the boat, it felt like your fault. 

Twenty years on, I still think it was my fault. To this day, I can see the fallout in my bank account. Going to that writing retreat cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And it broke my brain. I felt that my choice to wall off a space for focus and creativity had been punished, and I feared making that mistake again. The “freedom” side of freelancing got swallowed by the insecurity of it. Every time a job ended, I had a white-hot point of panic that led me to say yes to the next gig, even if it didn’t interest me. I’d soothe myself to sleep on difficult jobs by counting on my fingers how many weeks I’d been there, how much I’d earned—as if I could somehow, through brute force, fill the hole I felt I’d blasted in my future.

One reason that my decision felt so devastating was that at that time I was on my own: No partner to help out, no fortune to inherit, no guild. When all the ways we have to secure our futures depend on our own decisions and random luck, one wrong decision can break you. Want to save for retirement? Put your money in the giant casino of the stock market and pray it doesn’t crash. Want an education? Go into crippling debt. Want to have a comfortable old age? You better not get sick.

Want a vacation? To write poetry? To teach high school? Count on your fingers how much it’ll cost you. 

Then ask yourself if you’re worth it.

A lot of us beat ourselves up for our anxiety. But it’s understandable to feel panicked when you’re wondering about college costs and mortgage bills and if you can ever retire. During the writers’ strike, I knew freelancers of all kinds who’d had steady middle-class lifestyles for years. Suddenly they were driving Ubers and delivering groceries, unable to afford health insurance or their rent. A professor friend told me that his students, terrified by their own debt, are ruthlessly mercenary. “They don’t let themselves dream,” he said. Why imagine a life you can never afford to have?

Those of us who had work didn’t feel like we could stop. I said yes to job after job, fearing they’d dry up. I got used to the 10- or 12-hour days. I got used to ignoring my friends’ calls; I couldn’t afford a distraction that might make me miss make my deadlines. I got used to getting home well after my husband and stepson had eaten dinner, shoveling forkfuls of reheated pasta as the clock ticked past 9. I got used to spending weekends flat on my back, turning down invitations, never questioning why I was always so tired.

As my stepson was applying to colleges, it hit me that for the entirety of his high school career, four years straight, I’d had no breaks at all—no vacation, or even days between jobs. In the blur of ceaseless grinding, I had trouble remembering what I’d loved about editing in the first place.

My husband finally convinced me to plan a long-overdue vacation, which hit the week the kid left for school. When work came knocking, I let them know I’d have to block out those three weeks. Could they work around that absence? Job after job said no. I didn’t only lose the vacation time; I lost all the potential weeks leading up to and out of the trip. 

I panicked, my fears coming true. I’d made space for myself, the unallowable sin that would be punished. I told my husband. He stared at me, and spoke slowly.

“Punished?” he repeated. 

I laughed.

The dam broke. My brain started to rearrange itself. The months before my stepson left for school would be the last time he’d be the kid we’d shepherded for so many years, and it was the last chance for him to see me as something other than stressed out and exhausted. Realizing this, I felt lighter, and let myself savor the coming break.

Right before my last gig ended, I got a call from a producer I really liked, offering a job that sounded interesting. At another time, I’d have jumped at it. Instead, I told him, with practiced regret, that my upcoming vacation wouldn’t allow me to take the job. 

“I don’t care about that,” he said. When did my current job end? Friday? Perfect. I could start Monday. We’d get to rough cut just before my trip and …

His words went blurry. I struggled to respond. I’d had a ready script when jobs came calling: “yes.” The only time I’d decline was when I was already booked. Even as he spoke, I could feel myself reverting to form, counting the wages I’d earn in the weeks before the kid left forever. Stalling, I told him I’d let him know in the morning.

It was a rough night. It was easier to lose the other jobs: They were turning me down. I hadn’t had to choose. This was different. I’d spent decades being a hard worker, responsibly saving for retirement. Who was I if I simply said “No thanks”?

But like the girl in Malick’s movie who’d been altered by the mere idea of leisure, I’d already envisioned the time with my stepson, and I saw that it was more valuable than the money it could create. The difference between me and the girl was that, for her, the idea was brand new. But I already knew how to value time, joy, friendships, family. The only problem was, I’d forgotten.

I didn’t take the job. Did I spend the unscheduled weeks with my stepson having idyllic picnics by the river, bathed in golden-hour light? No. It was bad movies on Netflix, making cupcakes for no reason, doing Target runs, and making each other laugh. And it was great.

I still struggle with the idea that I deserve, or can afford, to take time to just be. Of course, it was easier when I was young and things were cheap. I can’t make things less expensive, or the world less precarious. But I can at least start to recognize the ways the game has warped me away from the young woman who enjoyed her life and edited for the sheer love of it. I can find that love again, in part, by stepping away from it.

A picnic by the river won’t solve everything. But it’s a start.

Are you facing economic anxiety or uncertainty in your life? How much of this is due to the hard numbers in your bank account versus the overall precarity of our times? How do you manage it?