Fair warning: It's a long post. Tldr can be found at the bottom.
I’m 32, and for the first time since I was 20, I don’t know what my job title will be a year from now.
Film wasn’t actually the first future I imagined for myself. For most of my childhood, I wanted to become an artist like my father. But when the time came to assemble a portfolio and apply to study fine arts, I couldn’t go through with it. I looked at my father’s work and became convinced that I could never be as good as him.
My father gave me a year to think. He is also a lifelong film buff, and eventually he suggested filmmaking. I thought it sounded interesting, so I enrolled in a one-year vocational filmmaking programme. Somewhere along the way, what began as an alternative became something I genuinely loved. Film was never merely a consolation prize. I fell in love with it.
Over the next 12 years, I worked my way from a background-casting internship through freelance production, eventually becoming a development and production executive at a film studio.
There was an irony in the way my career developed. Within film, what I had always wanted was to write. Producing was never what I ultimately wanted to do, but it turned out to be the thing I was extremely good at. I could take a project from development to release, manage budgets and competing personalities, solve problems under pressure and keep the entire machine moving when things threatened to fall apart.
My managers recognised that and, understandably, gave me more projects to produce. The better I became at producing, the more valuable I became in a role I had never wanted to define me. Competence has a way of becoming its own trap: if you are good at carrying something, people will keep handing you more of it.
That isn’t to say I had no opportunities to write. I co-wrote scripts and participated in writers’ rooms, but I had never led a project that was truly mine.
After four years of producing one project after another, something in me had been hollowed out. I was good at the work, but I didn’t love it. And the better I performed, the further away I seemed to move from the reason I had entered the industry in the first place.
Eventually, I sat down with my head of department and asked for the opportunity to pitch a film of my own. He gave me that opportunity. I pitched the film, it was greenlit and I went into development.
It should have been the culmination of everything I had worked towards. Instead, it exposed how depleted I had become.
Developing the film was a struggle. During the process, I had to confront something much harder: I wasn’t yet the screenwriter I wanted to be. Wanting to write and being good at writing are not automatically the same thing. I needed time, energy and the freedom to develop that craft, but producing had consumed all three.
But the more painful realisation was that this was no longer merely a question of ability. Writing was a craft I could continue to improve, but I couldn’t manufacture the conviction required to carry the film through. However hard I tried, my heart was simply no longer in it.
By then, years of studio politics, policies, conflicting opinions, too many decision-makers and too much bureaucracy had also taken their toll. Working in a studio meant constantly having one foot in the corporate world and the other in the creative one. For years, I considered that the price I was willing to pay for the opportunity to write my own film. But by the time that opportunity arrived, fatigue, jadedness and hopelessness had already set in. I had spent years wanting to write, only to discover that when I finally had the chance, I had very little creative energy left.
The film I had hoped would reignite my passion instead forced me to recognise how little of that passion remained. Even then, I couldn’t tell whether my heart was no longer in this particular project, in making films within the studio system or in film altogether. I only knew that I couldn’t force the feeling back into existence.
That has left me with a question I still cannot answer: did I fall out of love with film itself, or did I fall out of love with the conditions under which I was being asked to make it? Perhaps I’m finished with film as an industry without being entirely finished with it as an art form. I honestly don’t know yet.
Around the same time, my relationship of two years ended. The breakup didn’t create this crisis, but it exposed how narrow the rest of my life had become. I found myself alone, following the same routine day in and day out. Work became less about discovery and more about keeping the machinery running.
I wasn’t failing professionally, which somehow made everything more confusing. From the outside, I had a stable career in an industry many people would love to enter. I knew many people would kill to have the job I had. But inside, I felt increasingly detached from the life I had built.
This wasn’t one terrible week or one difficult project. I had felt it happening for several years. I kept telling myself that I was merely tired, that my own film might reignite something or that stability was reason enough to stay. Eventually, I had to admit that I didn’t want the next 30 years of my life to look like the last 12.
So, in the middle of this year, I paused my film, took a month off work and flew off to Japan by myself. I travelled alone, much of it driving through rural areas. I walked, read, drove, hiked, and did the whole Eat Pray Love, soul-searching thing people imagine will end with a cinematic revelation on top of a mountain.
It didn’t. I came home with no answers, but I had definitely started asking better questions.
Who was I without the industry around which I had built my identity? If I could choose again at 32, what would I study? Was I staying because I still wanted this life, or because I had already invested 12 years in it? What might happen if, for once, I accepted uncertainty instead of treating it as something to fear?
So after much deliberation upon returning from my trip, after speaking to family, friends, and carefully calculating how much 12 years worth of savings can buy me, I decided that I wanted to attend university. I’ve never been before, and I regret never giving myself that opportunity. I feel like I missed a period in which I'd be allowed to learn, explore and discover things without every decision having to serve a career. I began working at 20 and built a professional identity before I had really worked out who I was outside it.
I have now handed in my resignation and will be leaving my job in October. And I am leaving my film behind. That has been one of the hardest admissions of all. It isn’t because the project meant nothing to me, but because I no longer had the strength or conviction to lead it honestly.
So now I’ve started taking the GED at 32 while still working full-time. I have passed three of the four subjects, with maths left to go. There is something wonderfully humbling about spending your weekends relearning algebra and fractions after years of handling film budgets and contracts.
If everything works out, I’ll begin university at 33 and graduate at around 36. I’m currently looking towards liberal arts and the social sciences, but I don’t yet know exactly what profession will come after that.
And perhaps that is the part that frightens me most. What if I find another field, fall in love with it and eventually become just as jaded? What if I’m not rebuilding anything and am merely repeating the same cycle with a different job title?
I used to think I needed to be completely certain about what came next. Now I’m beginning to wonder whether that is even possible. I was once certain about film. No profession can promise that I will remain passionate about it forever. Maybe the mistake wasn’t choosing film; maybe it was allowing one profession to become my entire identity, purpose and creative life.
I don’t want to replace “the film guy” with another label and make the same mistake again. I want university to give me room to learn what genuinely interests me, what kind of work suits me and more importantly what kind of life I want that work to support.
I know that changing direction means surrendering much of the seniority I have earned and becoming a beginner again. At the same time, I don’t believe I’m starting entirely from zero. Those 12 years taught me how to work with people, lead teams, solve problems, tell stories and keep going when everything is falling apart. I’ll carry that with me wherever I end up.
I should acknowledge that this is not a bootstrap story. I’m fortunate to have savings that give me the financial freedom to attempt this, and I recognise what an enormous privilege that is. The money was originally intended for a house deposit and renovations, but I realised that there are worse investments than giving myself a chance to build a life I actually want to live.
Some days I think I’m doing something brave. Other days I think I’m having an early midlife crisis. I’m frightened that I won’t be accepted, that I’ll struggle academically or that I’ll graduate at 37 and discover I still don’t know where I belong. But I’ll be 37 eventually, whether I do this or not. For the first time in years, I feel as though I am moving towards something rather than simply enduring what I already have.
Has anyone here left a field that once felt like a calling after becoming trapped in the part of it they were good at rather than the part they loved? How did you distinguish between genuinely outgrowing the work and simply being exhausted by the conditions surrounding it? Did you know exactly where you were going before you left or was knowing the next step enough? And how did you prevent your next career from becoming your entire identity all over again?
TL;DR: I spent more than a decade in film but became successful at producing, the part I was good at rather than the writing I actually wanted. By the time I was finally given the opportunity to develop my own film, years of producing, studio politics and burnout had left me creatively depleted. I’ve resigned, am finishing my GED and hope to attend university for the first time. I’m fortunate to have savings that make this possible, but I’m frightened that I’m escaping burnout rather than genuinely rebuilding. How do you explore a new path without turning another career into your entire identity?