I Volunteer as Tribute (Embrace Your Catalyst)

It starts like this …

“I wish I could volunteer as tribute,” my colleague says, and something in my soul wrenches.

It’s about eight months ago, and I’m holed up in my office at a global manufacturing company, on speakerphone, discussing all the ways the supply chain has fallen apart. In March of 2020 our company was furloughing employees because the economy was shut down and we didn’t have enough orders to fill. Fast-forward sixteen months and we cannot hire enough employees to make all the orders that continue to flood in despite an unprecedent series of price increases and astronomical lead times.

Business is booming, but everything is hard, and we are all so, so tired.

My colleague is wonderful at their job. A real rockstar—driven, knowledgeable, ahead on all their goals. But utterly human, and utterly exhausted. As for myself, I managed to get promoted in the midst of all this mess, to an analyst role that I truly enjoyed. I think I was having fun for about three months longer than anyone else in my company.

I am not having fun anymore.

“I wish I could volunteer as tribute,” my colleague says. And I think, “Gosh, so do I.”

Finding Your Breaking Point

It’s an admittedly imperfect riff off the famous line from The Hunger Games when Katniss volunteers to take her little sister’s place in a televised death match. In the beginning of the pandemic, employees at our company could volunteer to be furloughed, keeping their health insurance but not their paycheck. Taking one for the team, so to speak. But by this point it’s all hands-on deck. There’s no voluntary time off. There’s no time off, period. There is so much work to be done.

It’s work that I’m good at, with people that I like. Work that pays well. Work that I anticipated doing for many years.

But it isn’t my dream.

It’s the second career I’d fallen into after my non-profit career imploded in burnout.

What I really want to do is write novels. That’s why I have an English degree from a liberal arts college. But writing a book was something I had to do “on the side” until somehow I got discovered and published and successful enough that I could quit my real job and write full time while still paying my bills.

Seemed like an achievable goal when I was 21 and fresh out of college.

But now I’m 34 and still not any closer. My computer is filled with half written novels, most started in the month of November. A few that made it to the final act, but none polished enough for an agent’s desk.

And suddenly there’s this thought in my head of what my life could be like if I volunteered as tribute. The metaphor falls apart here—there’s no one’s place to take, my company actually wants me to stay, I don’t have to fight anyone to the death. No one’s screaming, as much as sometimes I want to. But the phrase is infused with Katniss’s ballsy determination. No one expected her to do that.

And gosh, no one expected me to leave either.

But …

Leaving District Twelve

Suddenly I’m picturing what my life could be like if I wasn’t spending all my time and energy putting band aids on a supply chain that is gushing from a dozen wounds. How I would actually read, like any good author is supposed to—but who has time to read, hold down a day job, and write a book? How I could finish these revisions that were dragging on for literal decades and then take the chance to send the book out into the world and see what happens. Even if no one wanted to publish it, at least I’d know that I’d tried. I could let go of my regrets about so much wasted time.

I hate change. It shows up in all my personality profiles. I’m the kind of person who digs in their heels and just works through any unpleasantness. I don’t like to give up. I shudder at the word quit. I also fall far too easily into the trap of accepting something “is what it is” instead of taking a step back and realizing that I can get the heck out of Dodge. You don’t marry your work, guys. You didn’t swear a vow before your friends and family and God Almighty to stay in your cubicle forever, for richer or poorer, til death do you part. (Unless you work for that creepy company in Severance. I feel like that might be a second season reveal.)

But I’m also the kind of person that when I finally reach my breaking point and realize a change is necessary, it’s like flipping a switch. A quantum leap, from one decision to another, with no space in between. Changes are never so easy to execute, but I decide on them pretty quick. And then I don’t want to look back.

Flipping the Switch

Absolutely crazy as it was, by the time I hung up the phone I was pretty certain I wanted to leave my job.

There was a lot I had to work out. The finances. The logistics. Telling my parents. Telling my boss. Telling everyone who counted on me.

Maybe this is where you falter. You know you need a change. You might even know what it is. But taking the leap seems too daunting. The gap is too wide. It’s risky.

I’m not trying to downplay logistics. I needed to figure all that out, and you do too. But I know that every time I said I couldn’t do something “because…” <insert logistical excuse here> what I really meant was I didn’t want to, because I was afraid, or at the very least too comfortable to take a risk. It’s a lot easier to say we’re too busy or broke than admit that we’re scared.

So I didn’t think about the logistics at first. I imagined what my life could be—what I wanted it to be—and I fell in love with the idea so thoroughly that there was no turning back.

The All Important Catalyst

What brought me to that point on that particular day? What turned a potentially forgettable conversation into one of the most important in my life?

In novels there’s a moment near the beginning of the story that changes the hero’s life forever. It’s often called the inciting incident, or the catalyst. This moment propels them into what the story’s truly about—the plot, the excitement, the growth and change. After this inciting incident, the hero can never go back to the way things were at the start of the book. Think Harry getting his Hogwarts letter and finding out he’s a wizard. Or Katniss volunteering for the Hunger Games.

That conversation was my catalyst. Turns out there was a lot of setup leading to that catalyst… hence the very real need to rewrite my life and get on with the good stuff. I’ll get into that later, in case you need more of a push.

In most novels the setup portion only last for the first 10% of the book. Where the character starts is never the most important part. Readers care about where the character ends up, and how they get there.

Don’t Stay Stuck in the Setup Forever

But I’d been stuck in setup mode for 34 years, and since I don’t expect to live to the ripe old age of 340, I’d been staying there way too long. No matter how old you are, if anything I’ve said resonates with you, I bet you’re stuck in the setup too, at least in some aspect of your life.

If my personal story was a thriller—or a YA space fantasy like my beloved novel—my speakerphone revelation might make a pretty dull catalyst. But in this nuanced psychological study of a millennial’s struggle for purpose and fulfillment it seems apt enough. I want to write Young Adult fiction. Might as well be motivated by some!

What’s your catalyst? Maybe it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it has, but you’re stuck in the “debate” stage—more on that later. Maybe you’re ignoring catalysts each and every day.

In fiction, the catalyst is typically something that happens to the hero. They have little to no say in the matter. They’ll make their big choices later. I’m going to lean on this “rewriting your life” theme pretty heavily, but the truth is your life isn’t fiction. You’ve got to write the story and live it. You don’t have to wait around until something exciting happens. Far too often we spend our lives hoping something will change them, not accepting that we can—and should—be that something.

Up until that day, my life had been a series of ignored catalysts—some that I’ll share with you, many that I’ve forgotten or never noticed in the first place. My hope for you is you won’t let your next one pass you by. You’ll start imagining what your life could be instead of dreading what it is now.

When the time comes, I hope you’re ready to volunteer.