I had generous doctoral funding in the humanities with a very light teaching load and left to be a stable-hand, mucking stalls and throwing breakfast and lunchbhay to the horses. (So this kinda sorta counts, since I was still in school, and the labor job was always going to be temporary. Having said that I loved it and still miss it). In the end I worked at the stable for about a year.

It paid almost nothing. I rented a room and was broke. But the work was cathartic and interesting and completely altered my world— or dropped the world I’d known away, leaving this really interesting (again temporary) moment of peace in its place. Status wise, when you do something like that, you meet new people. There are different ways of comparing status— and of not even caring at all about it.

It took me a while to adjust away from academic thinking, which manifested largely as an extreme lack of confidence if I wasn’t quoting someone else’s argument or surrounded by piles of books. The stable was a great place to sort some of that and to like regain a sense of self (and people in the world, more broadly than in the university) in a really tangible way.

I wound up doing a bunch of different work over time. A mix seems to me ideal at this point. Ha still trying to figure it out.