Why I took a job I plan to leave
On choosing a role not as a landing, but as a classroom, and what Aluna has to do with any of it.
When I accepted my analyst role at a hospitality group, I already knew it wasn't the final shape of my life. Everyone around me read it as an arrival. I understood it as tuition.
That's not a confession, and it's not a contradiction either. 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 will keep my own studio alive someday. I chose the room for what it could teach me.
The word "temporary" deserves more respect than it gets
We say "temporary" like an apology, as if a thing has to be permanent to count. But some of the most permanent parts of me were built in temporary rooms. Years in a dance studio I always knew I'd leave. Opera training. Acting conservatory. None of those seasons were forever, and all of them are still with me. Temporariness was never the enemy of depth. It was the invitation.
What Aluna has to do with any of it
I make a video essay series called Aluna partly because I needed a home for this kind of thinking. Its whole premise is that return, not ascent, is the real shape of a creative life. You come back to the body, to the instrument, to the question, and every return teaches you something the first arrival couldn't.
A job you're inside of on purpose, while you prepare for what's next, has that same shape. It isn't waiting. It's practicing.
What I'm taking with me
Numbers, of course. An operator's patience. A feel for labor and margin, and for what a shift is like from the inside. Most of all, a respect I couldn't have earned any other way for the people who keep a room running, the ones whose names never show up on the menu. They know things about care and endurance that no classroom teaches.
When I open my studio, I want my P&L to be legible to me the way a score is legible to a singer. Not because I'm brilliant, but because I stayed in the room long enough to learn the music underneath it. And I want the people who work with me to feel seen the way this job taught me to see the people who hold every room together.
If you're in a season like this one, inside a job you know isn't your forever, you don't owe anyone an apology for it. Ask what it's here to teach you. What you pay in time can come back to you as fluency.