In the year 2000 I went to The Millennium Dome, which despite constant mockery during its planning and construction was a pretty pleasing museum - if museum is the right word. It had an angle on humanity and the future, zones and ideas rather than traditional exhibits.

The Work Zone looked ahead to the working life of the 21st Century, and ventured that most people would have more than one job at once. I didn’t like this idea, as I had my future clear in my mind. I was 15, and knew with a certainty that I’d be a high-school English teacher, and felt T he Dome was stirring up trouble and doubt where I didn’t want any.

Dear listener, I did not become a high-school English teacher. Many reasons. When I told my English teacher at the time - the excellent Mr. Bancroft - that I wanted to be a teacher he simply said ‘don’t’. I don’t know if he meant nobody should become a teacher, or that I was particularly ill-suited. I think the latter. I can’t drive, which is more important for teachers than you’d think. Also, I don’t know how to communicate with school-age folk, and I’m easily bullied, and my ability to remember names and faces is next to zero.

I studied creative writing at uni, which seemed like a good idea at the time, and then went into care work, then various temp filing jobs, worked my favourite job as personal assistant to disabled students at a University but when I moved to Sheffield that had to end, so I went back into care work which turned out to be ruinous to my health. That was my first decade in the workplace. I’ve left out my school-age short term positions as a movie extra and a cathedral verger. Those were fun but brief.

I quit care - which phrased like that sounds inhuman - due to what later turned out to be burnout and depression. 7 months later to the day, I became a self-employed English tutor at an online school helping Japanese business and non-business people practice natural-sounding English conversation. I speak no Japanese, but I speak English, and that’s the part they like. On one level I have the job I thought I’d have, but on most other levels, no I don’t. This is not a job with the sort of salary most people live on. It is enough yen to survive, and I’m good at surviving - and the job is part-time. This was a surprise at first, when I wasn’t allotted as many hours as I thought I needed, but in reality it’s much easier for me to cope with life part-time. I do some of their admin too, which was never my intention. I’m good at the teaching but shonky at the admin, but I suspect I’m improving.

And it’s not my only job. This time last year I started taking music commissions through an online service. In particular, I write fun and catchy theme-tunes for people’s podcasts, which it turns out is exactly my musical niche, and this is probably 10 or 20% of my income, which is handy given the cost of milk these days. The Millennium Dome spoke true.

For very much of the past five years I’ve worried about losing my job, mainly because the school could have collapsed. It didn’t, but at times it seemed precarious - and when it didn’t, it sometimes seemed impossible to live on. I had horrors of losing my work, because I fear being without a job and having to seek more work. My real fear is needing to go back to care work, which broke me, and returns in nightmares. Not the work part. The job part. The last time I was workless it took 7 months to find something. I think I was in a sorry state. It shouldn’t take that long, for the low-level work I tend to do. And now I’m conspicuously non-binary. I’m obviously transitioning, and not in a handsome way. That would make job-seeking and job-doing harder, I think. I really don’t want to wear a tie every day.

In many ways it’s one of my greatest fears, and I think contributed to a lot of internal tension. That it’d crumble, or become unsustainable. Finding a side-hustle has eased that a bit, but facing my fear has helped. I told my housemate Ava about my fears, and she put it to me that I shouldn’t fear losing what is not technically a good job — that I’m not as incompetent and unemployable as I imagine. That I shouldn’t and needn’t leave it if I don’t want to, but that building so much of my life and my mental health on such shaky foundations is foolish. These weren’t her words, by any means - her point was more that change shouldn’t be feared, because in life things do change. If you find all your peace and security in the idea that things will stay the same - in your employment, in your relationships, and so forth, you’re setting yourself up for a breakdown, because employment changes. Family and friends die or fall away. Earthly security comes with disappointments, surprises. The Millennium Dome was right to predict change in the way we work. Things get worse, things get better, and if your greatest hope is that things can stay how they are, then gosh darn you’re in trouble.

I use the phrase ‘peace and security’ there because 1 Thessalonians 5 makes alarming use of it.

*But concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need that anything be written to you. ****
For you yourselves know well that the day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night. When people say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come on them, like birth pains on a pregnant woman. Then they will in no way escape.*

The prophecy is one of the Day of the Lord, which I take to be the end of the world, but the idea of people saying ‘peace and security’, and feeling confident that nothing can be interrupted is one I feel keenly and often, like the start of any disaster movie. We always want to get our ducks in a row and feel we have peace and security. As I say, things change, surprises come, even slow surprises that dawn on you over time. You don’t need to panic. You don’t need to beware, but you do need to be aware.

It took me time to internalise that, but I think it’s good guidance. Live knowing that change is possible and inevitable. Now I don’t fear the devastation and loss of my job. I’m not going to leap at it - for one thing the school needs me and the students seem glad of me - but I know nothing lasts forever. One day the school will prosper and I will rise with it, or it will go to dust, or circumstances will lead me away in whatever direction. I won’t like that time, but it’s foolish to fear it. Like age, like death, like all of mortality’s horrors, you just have to take it under advisement, and approach it with prayer and acceptance. You can always quit, dear listener, things can always change, and one day, whatever it is will stop.