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Illustration by Catherine Chan
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a Canadian quits their soul-sucking corporate job, pivots to pursue their passion, opening a coffee shop or a vintage shop or whatever. In the process, they find autonomy and happiness and financial freedom. This type of story – let’s call it career-pivot porn – was everywhere postpandemic, as if publications took pleasure in taunting their desperate, housebound, cash-strapped audiences.
Reality, of course, is always a little bit different. These “pivots” are often underwritten by family wealth or a well-heeled partner. Or, the transition isn’t quite so smooth, with businesses bleeding money behind the scenes, no matter how well the operation seems to be performing on Instagram.
My story is similar, with a bit of a twist. I stopped following my passion – only to pursue another passion.
I guess this all starts in 2016. During the last semester of my philosophy undergrad at Western University, I had the brilliant idea to become a writer. I was doing my scholarly due diligence, reading some of the classics, like Orwell’s Animal Farm, along with some of the lesser known modern greats, such as David Foster Wallace. I thought I could be just like those writers. Rich, successful, famous.
I got a master’s in journalism from NYU, came back to Canada for an editing job at Toronto Life magazine and then did the freelancing thing for a while. I had some success. At my peak, I interviewed former mayor John Tory and did some reporting for The New York Times. All good stuff. But behind the scenes, I was constantly stressed and struggling to make rent, wondering if I would ever break through and make the big bucks.
Then things changed. This past summer, a friend invited me to coach a small group of 11-year-old volleyball players, to help them prepare for their upcoming club season. Back in the day, I played NCAA Div. 1 volleyball at Long Beach State University, one of the top American schools, before finishing up my career at Western (go Mustangs!). I always loved volleyball, but pushed it to the side as I got more serious about academics, thinking it couldn’t be a career.
I jumped at the opportunity to coach the kids. To put it mildly, writing was taking up less and less of my day, so the thought of playing volleyball in the park seemed like heaven. So, every morning in the late summer, for a couple of hours, I met the kids in a park in midtown Toronto and started training. We focused on the fundamentals: passing, setting, serving. We played on a cheap, mobile net. I had gone from interviewing the mayor to bopping a ball around in a park with a bunch of kids. How had it come to this?
But here’s the thing: it was a lot of fun. I didn’t have to sit behind a computer. The parents paid me fairly and right away. I didn’t have to deal with any bureaucratic phoniness or the empty feeling that, despite all of my hard work, the industry would eventually outsource all of my labour to artificial intelligence. (The computers haven’t overtaken coaching – yet.)
Over the years, labouring away in journalism, I had lost all sense of youthful levity. I started writing because it was an unfettered means of expression. But working a full-time job, plus trying to make a living, combined with the polarity of the internet, had turned the whole writing thing into a Sisyphean burden. I had become so accustomed to living in a state of stress, totally immersed, like most Canadians, that I didn’t even realize it. (But does a fish know it’s living in water?) I wanted to be serious and well respected in my career as a writer, but it defeated the purpose of following my passion in the first place.
Volleyball reawakened a spirit of playfulness. Plus, I had a bunch of dormant volleyball knowledge. I found myself shouting at the kids, hopefully not too loud, about techniques and strategies that I hadn’t thought about in a decade. It had been sitting there, somewhere in my subconscious, waiting to burst out, like lyrics to a lullaby that our parents sung to us forever ago.
So I went all in. I found gym space and started running my own clinics. I created an organization called Super Volley, which runs sessions for athletes aged 5-18, every Saturday.
Things are going decently well so far (fingers crossed). Of course, like many small businesses, I’m at the mercy of an insane cost of living, a ruthless economy, consumers who in all likelihood could devote their Saturdays to something else. But I’ll keep going, because this volleyball thing rewards me in ways that go well beyond money or journalistic prestige.
A few weeks back, I caught myself in an intense game of volleyball with a group of 13U Girls, joining the action to help even out the numbers. The girls and their parents (and, okay, even me) were screaming with every point, erupting into fits of joy every time the ball hit the floor. I had totally forgotten about following my passion.
Mathew Silver lives in Toronto.