I became a corrections officer because I wanted to help people and make a difference, I truly was passionate about the industry and believed it was possible to make positive change in offender behavior to reintegrate them into society. I mean it’s what the academy taught me.

A few months in and I’m realizing these guys don’t want to be helped, and they hate me because of the color of my shirt. It’s become a very toxic environment full of threats and aggressive behavior from them towards me, which I don’t think is healthy for my mental health and know it’s only a matter of time before one of them assaults me.

That being said it wouldn’t matter to me as long as I knew I was making a positive change, but I don’t feel I’m making the difference I sought out to in the beginning.

Most of my time now is spent making busts that gets them either more time or moved to solitary which is in no way contributing to them changing their life, all while the dirty officers keep bringing things in. It feels like a battle I’ll never win, which brings me to my question.

When do you give up on what you thought was your passion?

How do you know if it still is your passion and just going through a rough patch?

I still have days where I’m fired up and enjoy what I do, but they are rare and far apart. I feel I invested too much time and worked too hard to graduate the Academy to simply step back, I feel if I give up I’ll regret it or see it as a personal flaw in my character.

-Michelle

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Hey Michelle-

It sounds like you got into your line of work for the right reasons, and it’s wonderful that your ambitions center around wanting to help people.

That said, with any career choice, personal sustainability is key, and although it’s possible to stick with something that is draining—psychologically or physically—it’s also worth considering what the end-game might be, and whether things will ever change.

It sounds like you’re doing this math right now, and that you suspect things won’t change significantly, and thus, you’d better adjust something on your end; which could mean many things.

You could, for instance, attempt to change your mindset so that you find victories in non-obvious places, satisfaction in places other than where you initially planned, and essentially recalibrate your expectations to better suit the reality of your field as it exists in the real world (as opposed to an idealized or theoretical one; like the version of reality we’re taught about in school or the academy).

You might also consider stepping back and assessing your first-principles priorities to figure out what you should actually be doing with your time.

First-principles thinking means, rather than attempting to redesign a plane, realizing that what you really want to do is fly, and therefore also considering non-plane options, like helicopters, hang-gliders, jet-packs, and so on. You might still end up with a plane, but you’re allowing yourself to consider other options that don’t fit into that higher-order category, as well.

We have, for a variety of reasons, reflexive understandings of how certain problems are solved and certain itches are scratched, and although becoming a corrections officer was one potential way to do what you want to do, to make a certain type of change in the world, it’s nowhere near the only way to do so.

It’s possible you could find another career path that allows you to help people in that way, and to perhaps do so via a means that would allow you to see more productive outcomes—and feel good about those outcomes—while also being in less overt danger, and experiencing less continuous stress.

If you decide to start thinking along these lines, allow yourself to really abstract the situation and think beyond industry-silo possibilities.

It may be that a more suitable career can be found adjacent to what you’re doing now, but it may also be that you could accomplish more, and in a way that’s more sustainable for you, if you work in an entirely different field, approaching the problem asymmetrically. Working from the legal angle to change laws that reinforce underlying issues in the criminal justice space, for instance, could attain some of the same results, as could working to bring better grocery options to food deserts, which are thought to be one of the many civil engineering, zoning, and financial problems that reduce regional opportunities and, consequently, incentivize crime.

As for your specific questions:

What I would suggest is setting a deadline at some point in the relatively near-future—a few months, maybe—at which point you’ll give yourself permission to reassess everything. You’ll allow yourself to fully consider changing careers, changing lifestyles, approaching the problems you want to solve from entirely different angles, whatever it takes to do so.

In the meantime, though, consider allowing yourself to re-contextualize what you’re doing, currently, and approach the issues you see from as many angles as you can.

Look at your lifestyle and ask yourself if there are tweaks you can make so that the work component becomes more tolerable and sustainable, and think about how you’re approaching work, your expectations and behaviors, and see if there’s anything you can adjust there, as well—to make things better for you and for the people you’re trying to help.

It may be that in a few months you’re more certain than ever that this isn’t going to work for you, but that’s the point of taking this time: to focus with intention on the issue at hand, but also to give yourself the chance to prove that original thought wrong, and to perhaps make changes that would allow everyone involved to benefit more from what you’re doing, currently.

If you do find that you can make your current status quo work, that’s wonderful. Keep on evolving and changing things as you go, and reinforce the gains you’ve made along the way.

If that’s not the case, however, and you realize that something more fundamental needs to change, you’ll want to start building yourself a runway—an escape plan, so you can psychologically and financially make the transition to whatever you decide to do next. And ideally you also get a better sense of what you want to do next, so that you know where you want to invest your time and energy, moving forward.

That might mean acquiring new skills, new education, new training, new perspectives. In a lot of cases, it makes sense to acquire these things while you still have a paycheck coming in, but it may be that some will need to wait because of time- or energy-constraints. Do your best to plan accordingly so that you don’t put yourself in another type of unsustainable situation (an economic one) by leaving what you’ve got now before you figure out where you’d like to go, next.

It’s a lot to think about, I know, but you’re already on the right track and asking the right questions.

The next step is giving yourself permission to act upon what you learn from asking those questions, taking some time to make sure your assessment is correct, and then mapping out your next steps—whether that means an adjusted version of what you’ve got now, or something entirely distinct that allows you to achieve similar ends from a different angle.