Nobody Teaches You How to Stop Being a Firefighter

There's a lot of effort put into teaching you how to become a firefighter. Months at recruits learning trucks, pumps, ladders, BA, knots, procedures and dragging hose around until you're absolutely sick of looking at the stuff. Then you finally get out to a station and realise recruits mostly taught you enough to stop you killing yourself while you actually learn how to do the job.

But nobody really teaches you how to stop being a firefighter.

And eventually, all of us do.

For some it'll be after 30 or 40 years, with a send-off at the station and a few beers with people they've worked with for half their life. For others it'll be a promotion that gradually takes them away from the truck and into an office. Sometimes an injury makes the decision for you. Sometimes life just heads in a different direction. And sometimes you leave a lot earlier than you ever thought you would.

However it happens, I reckon it can be a much stranger transition than people expect. Because somewhere along the way, without really noticing it, being a firefighter stops being just what you do for work and starts becoming part of who you are.

Someone asks what you do and the answer is easy. "I'm a firefighter." But there's a lot wrapped up in those three words. There's the uniform and the trucks and the actual jobs, obviously, but there's also the rhythm of shift work and station life. Walking in at change of shift and seeing who's on. Sitting around the kitchen table talking absolute rubbish. Knowing who makes decent coffee, who can't cook, who snores and who will suddenly find an incredibly important task to do at exactly the same time station clean starts.

You spend a ridiculous amount of time with the same people. Christmases, birthdays, nights, weekends. You see some great things together and occasionally some pretty ordinary things. You hear the same stories so many times you could probably tell them yourself. Someone gets a nickname because they did something stupid once in 2007 and, through some unwritten rule of the fire service, they're now required to answer to it for the rest of their natural life.

After a while, all of that just becomes normal. You don't really think about what being part of that little world gives you.

Until you're not part of it anymore.

People have asked me whether I miss being a firefighter. Sometimes I do. But strangely, I don't think it's necessarily the fires or the jobs that you end up missing most. It's all the boring stuff you barely noticed while it was happening.

Walking into the station in the morning. Seeing the same faces. Someone putting the kettle on. Standing around the truck talking shit while you're doing the checks. The conversations around the kitchen table that would make absolutely no sense to anyone outside the job.

More than anything, I think you miss being around people who understood that part of your life without you ever having to explain it.

Then one day, for whatever reason, you clean your locker out, throw your stuff in the car and drive home.

The next shift starts without you.

The trucks still go out the door. The roster gets filled. Someone else eventually gets your locker and some other arse is probably sitting in your seat at the kitchen table.

Which is exactly what should happen.

Still feels a bit weird though.

I don't think I appreciated how much structure the job gave my life either. For years, a roster basically tells you where you're going to be. On shift. Off shift. On shift. Off shift. You can look months ahead and know exactly where you'll be on a random Tuesday morning because there's a little coloured square on a roster telling you.

Even during a quiet shift there's always that possibility that the bells will go and thirty seconds later you'll be pulling your gear on and heading somewhere.

Then suddenly there's no roster. No station to walk into. No bells going off. Nobody waiting for you at change of shift.

At first, having nowhere you actually have to be can feel pretty bloody good. Then after a while it gets a little quieter.

And I reckon that's the bit we don't talk about enough. Not necessarily the big dramatic ending of a career. Just the quiet afterwards.

The relationships change as well. When you leave, everyone says they'll keep in touch, and they mean it. But inevitably some people drift away. Nobody's done anything wrong. The people still in the job keep doing the job and you've got your own life happening. Someone you used to spend 48 hours a week with becomes someone you message every six months saying, "Mate, we really need to catch up."

Neither of you actually organises the catch-up.

If I could tell younger firefighters anything about that, it would probably be to make sure there's something else in your life before you need it. Something that has absolutely nothing to do with the fire service.

It doesn't need to be some great purpose either. Have mates outside the job. Spend time with your family. Play golf badly. Go fishing. Build something in the shed. Grow tomatoes. Buy a motorbike your wife specifically told you not to buy. Whatever it is, have something that's yours.

Because it's surprisingly easy for the fire service to slowly become your whole world without you noticing. Your mates are firefighters. Your stories are about firefighting. Your social life involves firefighters. Someone asks how work was and somehow you end up spending twenty minutes explaining a pump problem to a person who stopped listening nineteen minutes ago.

Then eventually the uniform comes off.

And it probably helps if you already have some idea who you are without it.

I don't think I did. Not as much as I thought I did anyway.

There's probably a temptation when you leave to immediately replace the job with something else as well. Another career. Another big purpose. Something else that makes you feel useful. And maybe that's exactly what some people need. Plenty of former firefighters go into training, mentoring, volunteering, completely different careers or start something of their own. Others seem perfectly happy becoming the bloke whose lawn is suspiciously immaculate by 9am every Wednesday.

I don't think there's a right answer.

What comes next doesn't have to replace the fire service, because realistically nothing is going to be quite like it. Maybe part of leaving is accepting that.

You can miss the job and still be glad you're not doing it anymore. You can know leaving was the right decision and still occasionally wonder what's happening back at the station. You can go years without putting the uniform on and still automatically look up when a fire truck goes past.

I don't think any of that is particularly strange.

You spent a decent chunk of your life doing something unusual, alongside people you trusted, in circumstances most people will never experience. Of course some of it sticks around.

Some of it was brilliant. Some of it was shit. Most of it was probably somewhere in between. But it was yours.

Maybe that's why leaving can be harder than people expect. You're not just finishing a job. You're walking away from a routine, a group of people, a language, a culture and a version of yourself that existed for a long time.

We spend a lot of time teaching firefighters how to get into the job.

Maybe we should spend a little more time talking about how to get out of it.

Because eventually the job will keep going without you.

Make sure you do too.