Why I took a job I plan to leave

There's a specific kind of panic that sets in when you accept a job you already know isn't the final shape of your life. Everyone around you reads it as arrival. You know it's tuition.

I took my analyst role at a hospitality group knowing full well I was building toward a studio of my own. That wasn't a contradiction; that was the plan. Hospitality is the clearest working model I know for a creative business that has to perform financially every single night. If I can read the numbers that keep a restaurant alive, I can read the numbers that'll keep my studio alive five years from now.

The word "temporary" deserves more respect than it gets

We use "temporary" like an apology, as if anything worth doing had to be permanent to count. But the best seasons of my life have all been temporary on purpose. Years in a dance studio I knew I'd leave. A year of opera training. A stretch of acting conservatory. The temporariness was what allowed the depth.

I'm not performing job loyalty. I'm practicing apprenticeship. The distinction matters.

What Retorna Práctica has to do with any of it

I make a video essay series called Retorna Práctica partly because I needed a container for this kind of thinking out loud. The series' whole premise is that return, not ascent, is the real shape of a creative life. You go back to the body, back to the instrument, back to the question. Again, again, again.

A job you're in on purpose while preparing for what's next is that shape. It's not waiting. It's practicing.

What I'm taking with me

Numbers. An operator's patience. A vocabulary for labor, margin, and what a shift feels like from the inside. A respect for the people who keep a room running that I could not have developed in any other way.

When I open the studio in the coming years, my P&L will be legible to me the way a score is legible to a musician. Not because I'm brilliant. Because I apprenticed.