A long goodbye

I’ve been toying with the idea of retiring from my professional PR career for a while now and have been cutting back for more than a year. It’s remarkably hard to step away when you have clients who you love, who you trust, who work to make the world a better place and who seem to hold you in the same high regard. 

It was a different century when I made my first two hard work-related decisions. The first was to leave the newspaper that had welcomed me into journalism long before I had any right to be there to go to another. The second was to leave journalism for the “dark side” of the notebook and try my hand at public relations. Each transition led to many wonderful things and made me a believer that change is usually good.

I was 15 when I officially joined the workforce, which meant I had to get some sort of waiver to avoid child labor laws. I don’t count babysitting or the three days I earned a paycheck detasseling corn (a rite of passage in rural Indiana but not good for short girls who can’t reach the stalks where the tassels danced to summer country breezes.)

I can no longer remember if I was such a bad waitress that I got demoted to dishwasher or if I was such a good dishwasher that I got promoted to waitressing. No one missed me waitressing at the Sea Cove, I’ll tell you that. Through college, I worked two jobs – one in the deli department of a grocery and the other as a stringer for the Terre Haute Tribune Star.  

I had five glorious years with the TS. (Story for another day: I was 17 when I wrote my first page 1, top-of-the-fold article.) I spent another five years at the Evansville Press before making that leap to PR and worked for a time as a convenience store clerk to maintain my 20-something lifestyle in the big city of Indianapolis.

If I’ve learned anything since I joined the workforce from all my various roles– even in the cornfield – it’s that it’s the people that matter most no matter what you’re doing.

Technically, I’m still working as a contractor for TechPoint, a client since 2019, until the end of the year with project work in the offing. I handed the media relations reins over to my good friend and awesome PR pro Lara Beck earlier this month. Yesterday, we had a lovely gathering where my teammates said too many nice things, hugs were in abundance and I departed, fretting that I hadn't properly verbalized how much I've enjoyed working with them and all the people throughout the CICP ecosystem. And then, with no tasks at hand, I handed in my parking and building access cards.  

On Friday, gulp, I’ll no longer have a TechPoint email address or day-to-day responsibilities. The idea of that has been surprisingly hard. I’ve loved repping TechPoint where I’ve been treated more like an FTE than a contractor from Day 1. 

Ditto for the Arrive AI team, for whom I’m still on-the-clock and will be for a while.

Ditto for Angie’s List, which started out as a contract and became a decade-plus job with people I will never not answer the phone for. (I know that’s not a grammatically correct sentence, but I’m in my golden years; you’ll excuse me.) Like all things, the List has morphed, but Listers are forever and they and the MakeMyMove folks will always be family.

Ditto for my time in Governor Frank O'Bannon's office, which was a privilege of a lifetime and made me a better human being. 

Ditto, really, for everyone I’ve worked with over the years, on both sides of the notebook. I’ve been extremely fortunate, learned a lot and hopefully grew into the person the TechPoint team apparently thinks I am. My past is littered with poor decisions and terrible management of people, especially in the early years when I hadn’t yet realized there were other ways to accomplish a goal than my way.

Stepping away is hard, man.

It’s a silly thing to get verklempt about, given that I can’t say goodbye to anyone and that I’m still around, just differently and less available.

I say this is a long goodbye, but it’s not really goodbye at all. I’m not dead or dying (anymore than per usual for humans.) I’ll just be less tied to my phone and laptop. I’m looking forward to the day when my alarm clock will bleat only to tell me to check in for a flight or do something purely fun.

Any future paid PR work opportunities will be competing with fun stuff with the Captain, travel, lawn work, the gym and my hammock. I might even get around to wrapping up that racythriller book series I started so long ago. The fifth book is underway...

If my yard doesn’t look demonstrably better this season than in the past two-plus decades, it will be a sign that I should, indeed, go back to desk work.

If you’re in my neighborhood, keep an eye on the lawn. It’ll be your indicator that I’m #opentowork again.