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It’s Not Too Late to be What I Might Have Been

J Snyder Art
5 min readDec 18, 2024

Photo courtesy of the author, 2024

At 41 (almost 42) years old, I crossed the stage this past Saturday at Sacramento’s Golden 1 Center to receive my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Sacramento State. It was the end of one long journey to discover myself and launch forward into a new life dedicated to continuing that exploration. Mine is truly the story of a corporate drone that broke free of the madness.

Rewind back to the end of September of 2021, after nearly 18 months of Covid my job of 12 years scheduled a surprise midday meeting. I knew immediately what it was about and let out a sigh of relief. The company had been struggling, and as the sole events organizer who’d had her events disappear due to Covid and had been literally been working odd tech jobs around the office for a year and a half, I saw it coming from a mile away. I was lucky, I’d watched Covid creep through California for months before the official stay-at-home order of March 19th, 2020. A two-week notice is always nice, but I had the luxury of 18 months of lead time before they finally axed me.

It’s really weird to get fired on your day off, but that’s what happened. I’d scheduled a couple days off to recover from ankle surgery and only vaguely remember the HR lady’s well-practiced speech, launching into some corporate nonsense about Covid restructuring, offering me either a move to some BS job in sales…

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J Snyder Art
J Snyder Art

Written by J Snyder Art

After walking away from my job, I decided to take the plunge into art school and make my way through the world as an artist. New stories posted every Wednesday!

Responses (4)

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Congratulations on getting your papers! Well young lady, I envy you somewhat. I also got dumped in the prime of my work life at the top of my salary range, and I was elated! In High School, I was way into art mostly pottery and sculpting. I'll send…

1

Congrats! I bet it’s nice to be who you were meant to be!

Congratulations! All the best to you! I'm on a similar journey.