This is the Way Out
By Laura Waddell
I once had a publishing job that was, on paper, a good one, but where each day became a repeat of the one before, not helped by the literal and metaphorical gloom of a walk down a long dusty road to a bleak industrial estate, which in the winter had sidewalks too icy to be walked on, dodging trucks rushing to and from the warehouse. The old corporate nature of the place dragged on progress, and box-ticking micromanaging anchored business decisions as well as artistic and editorial ones. I felt frustrated, craved momentum, and started to plan my exit.
After each day, despite the looming prospect of a long and draining commute, I relished the feeling of stepping into the elevator and leaving. Closing the doors and taking the ride down to the ground floor was a rare moment alone after a day in a starkly lit open-plan office. Sometimes while inside I’d look at my reflection in the mirror. I saw it change over time, the fatigued reality catching up with the sallow wash of overhead lights.
But no other part of leaving and getting home was as satisfying as those 15 or 20 seconds it took to ride the elevator, not only because of the frustrating transport frequently subject to cancellations, through inhospitable industrial estate with sheet ice rendering pavements unusable in the winter, but because it was the part of the exit I had mentally assigned as the most meaningful. It was a ritualistic sigh of relief. It was the dividing line. I exited over and over again in that elevator and in my mind before the final, decisive exit at the end of my notice period.
One of my favorite job exits depicted on screen is really an entrance. (Or both at once.) Mad Men’s smart copy writer Peggy Olsen leaves her job, tired of being taken for granted and diminished by the men in the office. She strides down the corridor of her new advertising agency, holding a cardboard box of possessions, wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette. Her newfound confidence and success are palpable.
When I carted my own cardboard boxes out, I thought of this scene, taking personal effects and myself out of the building for the last time. On my final day, I rode the elevator and took a picture of myself smiling in the mirror, then left by the front doors without looking back. Spring was just around the corner. I opened a miniature bottle of Prosecco and drank from it with a straw then and there. Bubbles to match the levity of exiting once and for all.
All around us are exits that mark the dividing line between being in one place or another. Being inside or outside. We’re always on the move and so is the world around us, but if it feels like at any point we could come across an exit—like stepping into a black hole on the sidewalk and falling through it—exit signs are often there to guide the way.
This Transformations Snapshot is excerpted from Exit, part of the Object Lessons book series. Used with the permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury.
Laura Waddell is a writer and publisher based in Scotland and Exit, part of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series, is her first book. In 2019 Laura won a Write to End Violence Against Women Award for her column in the Scotsman newspaper, and her cultural criticism and fiction have appeared in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and McSweeney's Kinfolk, as well as on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Scotland.