I quit my job yesterday. Actually, yesterday was my last day. I put in my notice four months ago, but stayed on to provide coverage for a coworker on maternity leave. Because I'm "nice".

Tammy, one of the dental assistants I worked with for the past eight years said to me recently, "You're too nice and that's your problem. If you'd have stopped letting yourself get pushed around a long time ago, you wouldn't be burned out." She's a straight-talker. Tammy is a conspiracy theorist, just shy of five feet tall and has overly processed blonde hair that sprouts out of her ponytail like a spider plant. She intimidated me when I first started, but I grew to appreciate her and her unsolicited advice. I'll probably miss her.

I'm a dentist, and I have been one for over ten years, but everytime I say it, "dentist" has a question mark behind it. Like I woke up one day with a DDS at the end of my name, a diploma and a license and didn't quite know what to do with it and not like I spent years (my entire life?) busting my behind for it. Is it imposter syndrome? Perhaps. But that doesn't change the fact that, for me, practicing dentistry is miserable.

Since I wrote my letter of resignation, the front desk staff at the clinic have told patients I was retiring. I didn't correct them. I'm thirty-nine. I tell everyone I'm taking a break and figuring out what's next. A friend walked over when I returned home yesterday with balloons and flowers and said, "You are probably going to have an identity crisis. And that's okay."

I thought I would celebrate on my last day, but I mostly felt tired and sad. Friends and family congratulated me, but I kept thinking, for what? For being a quitter? For not knowing myself enough to choose a career that would actually fit me? Maybe it all feels mildly divorce-y. Not "like a divorce", because that would be far more emotional and life-changing, but divorce-y in that I chose something for myself that didn't end up working and while walking away from it is the right choice, it's still disappointing. It wasn't working not in like a "there are always ups and downs" way, but in a "every second of this makes me want to peel my face off and bolt out the door and run from this forever" way.

I could say it is the unique challenges of public health dentistry that make me want to peel my face off, but I do know myself enough to know that private practice is not my calling. In private practice the expectation to perform is even higher. Smile. Be a calming, gentle presence. But also be funny. Share entertaining anecdotes while operating a high speed handpiece at 400,000 rpms on a surface smaller than your fingertip. And sometimes do it while viewing your work in a tiny mirror. The mirror is consistently covered with water spray. Despite administering a more than adequate amount of anesthetic, the human attached to the tiny surface you are working on may quickly move and say, "I think I might've felt something!"

Why are dentists expected to be entertaining anyway? No one expects their physicians to be funny. You're lucky if you get a warm smile out of those people. A previous dentist left behind a joke book that was still on the shelf in the office next to the Color Atlas of Common Oral Diseases and the drug reference. (The Color Atlas of Common Oral Diseases is a great conversation piece. Highly recommended coffee table book.) A dentist with dry humor is classic, but even my dry humor was all dried up. Ha.

How did I get here? There's no backstory about how I wanted to be an artist and some career counselor told me dentistry was an art. There are no dentists in my family. I never had a dentist I found truly inspiring. I had a root canal when I was eleven, and the young endodontist told the assistant about his weekend adventures as he irrigated my tooth with bleach, and while that was intriguing to my young mind, it was not inspiring. As mentioned earlier, while growing up every adult I knew worked in healthcare, education or automotive. I job-shadowed my step-dad, who is a mechanical engineer, for one day and that was a hard no. I thought I wanted to be a pharmacist, because pharmacists worked in healthcare but didn't have to be particularly friendly or touch people. But I chickened out after some freshman chemistry classes and switched to a dental hygiene program. Dental hygienists are expected to be friendly and to touch people. Again, I don't know how I got here.

I spent my first summer as a hygienist filling in at a community dental clinic. Every Tuesday was emergency day and patients with toothaches would line up first thing in the morning to have their problem tooth removed. Over and over all day was the cycle of pain and tears followed by relief and gratitude. I wanted to do that.

I did get to do a lot of that. Seeing emergency patients truly in pain and getting them out of pain was the most rewarding part of my job. I guess I won't complain about all the worst parts. They can be summarized by consistently having to deal with people who accept zero responsibility for their problems. They have bad teeth because their parents had bad teeth, their babies stole calcium from their teeth, they can't brush their teeth because their toddler hides their toothbrush and they will not be convinced otherwise or consider implementing any recommendations. Sometimes it's fair to blame parents, like when they stock the shelves with soda and fruit snacks, make no effort to instill oral hygiene habits, and convince their kids that their teeth are bad because it runs in the family and there's nothing that can be done about it.

Once I had an eighteen year old kid in the chair who needed dentures. There was no saving his teeth. I saw his address in the computer and realized he was my next door neighbor for five years. I remembered him in flashes; sulking on the back steps of his house, Mountain Dew in hand, the smell of marijuana wafting over into our yard at night, kids laughing, long hair phase, skateboard phase. He cried upon hearing the bad news and then he got really angry and stormed out. I cried in the bathroom.

The past couple years have been tough. Maybe I wanted to be part of the Great Resignation. If I'm going to join a movement, a mass quitting is one I can really get behind. I'm a great quitter. Everyone feels they can share their opinions on everything with everybody right now. If the physical and patient management challenges of dentistry were not enough to burn me out, listening to the opinions and rants of my patients might have been what did it.

I had a patient who experienced severe vertigo when leaned back even the slightest bit. None of the hygienists would clean his teeth, so I agreed to do it. While I was literally bending over backwards to clean this man's teeth, he asked me if I wanted to hear what he thought about climate change. I said, "No, not really."

And he said, "Well, I'm gonna tell you anyways."

I know I can't escape contact with other human beings, though I do dream about it. (My dreams involve Michigan's Upper Peninsula, homesteading, and my closest friends and their families living a commune lifestyle.) But a break from daily contact with thirty to forty members of the wild and wonderful American general public in a high stress environment might be what I need for a while.

I will miss the people I worked with though. Recently while someone was microwaving broccoli in the lunch room (it was me), Tammy walked in and rasped, "It smells like a fucking fart in here!" At home I told my husband I still want to work in an environment where casual swearing and work-inappropriate conversations over lunch are acceptable. He recommended a federal government job.

I don't know what's next. Right now I have three kids at home and a tab open on my phone for an article called "30 Ways to Save Money Like Your Grandma Did." But I still found myself scrolling LinkedIn when I woke up at two o'clock in the morning and I haven't even had my identity crisis yet.