On leaving the capsule

I was listening to "Space Oddity" in the car on the way home from dropping my kids at school and couldn't help but read it as a song about early retirement from prestige/status culture. To go from being asked whose shirts you wear, to letting the spaceship take you where it knows you're meant to go...

I've had a weird week. We just got back from overseas travel and my sleep's been a mess. I'm trying to understand my place in the family - making a ton of expensive appointments for home maintenance and service providers and feeling intense guilt and shame that my salary isn't paying for any of it. At the same time my spouse is this confusing combination of deeply appreciative and deeply undermining - it feels like everything he says makes me feel like he relishes my failure to thrive in corporate life. He's very clear that he thinks I've wasted a lot of the last twenty years on chasing a brass ring that never made any sense for me compared to being a homemaker. Part of it is, of course, that I'm very touchy about all this right now. And part of it, of course, is that he's quite conservative culturally in a lot of ways, and always has been. It's never not been a source of conflict and discomfort between us. He's wished on some level that I didn't have a job for at least a decade. His wish is very close to coming true. I don't love that aspect of this journey! It's very hard not to think of this as "letting him win" - even though it's also undeniable that I hate my job and industry, and want to leave.

But at the same time, one of the awful chores I've been addressing is trying to sort through the kids' many boxes of art and schoolwork. They save everything, and most of it I know they won't miss. It's been so emotional seeing how quickly they change and grow and how much progress they've made. I'd be an idiot to feel like my depressing, disempowering corporate job even held a candle to getting to spend more time with these children. When it was good at work, it was good. But it hasn't been good in a long time. And frankly, most of the tech industry doesn't look that much better right now. Everyone doing work that "matters" in the ways I used to be attracted to is doing work I deplore. Every time it seems like someone is doing something morally aligned with my values, I'm like "ugh give it six months for the heel turn" and I'm never wrong.

So. I don't know. My circuit's dead...is something wrong?