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I want to change my life.

November 15, 2010 //  by Terra Osterling

I want to love my work.  I want to wake up each morning and feel overwhelming delight at the tasks that lie before me each day.  I want to be creative again and feel like I am doing exactly what I was made to do with my life.  I want to live to work instead of working to live.

For the past couple years I have been feeling stuck, like there was nothing I could do to change my path and I had no choice but to continue droning.  Then when I was at a particularly low point this past summer, my husband said to me,

“You know, if you came home from work one day with a box under your arm with all your stuff in it because you had quit, that would be okay.”

And then it  finally occurred to me that I could actually change my life!  We have relatively low debt, modest savings, no children, good health, and almighty youth.  I do not have to continue working a job that is not my life’s passion, even if it is a job I’m good at, where I am well-liked, and well-compensated with great benefits.

Therein lies a conundrum;  I shouldn’t complain, right?  Perhaps not, but I’m learning that there is no reason to acquiesce either.  I have had seven jobs in the fifteen years since I graduated from college, four of them within the first 2 years.   I wager that I’m not outside of the norm for my generation, and I would further wager that a lot of us are feeling the same about the jobs or careers we’ve fallen into.   So what am I waiting for?

I am a planner and I like control (a theme for another day), so the plan is as follows:   I am going to try to figure out what I am supposed to do with my life.

  1. I have plotted out a savings plan so that when the closing whistle shrieks on my last day, if I have no real prospects for livelihood, at least I’ll have decent savings for us to fall back on for a while.  (Full disclosure:  this plan works only because The Husband will continue to work, a selfless act!).  The goal is that by that time  I will have something lined up.  Maybe not as well-paying with as good benefits, but if the experiment plays out as I hope, it will be something that I love.
  2. I am going to gather as many new experiences as possible, hopeful of finding something that could be my calling, or at least continue to weed out “what I don’t want to do” with my life.  Classes, volunteering, inside and outside the comfort zone.
  3. I am going to blog about it right here.  Maybe you can help me along the way.

My life is now a blank page.  Wish me luck.

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Category: How I got "here", Uncategorized

Previous Post: « Is this thing on?
Next Post: Experience #1: Block Cutting & Spoon Printing »

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Comments

  1. Amy

    November 18, 2010 at 12:52 PM

    I’m looking forward to your blog, Terra! Nice work!

  2. Grace

    November 17, 2010 at 9:37 AM

    You have done well, grasshopper! Your writing sounds just like your voice. Looking forward to more posts. Let me know if you want to talk about marketing this baby.

    • suddenwriteturn

      November 17, 2010 at 7:06 PM

      Thank you! Hmmmm, yes, I DO want to talk about marketing this baby! I have not yet fully unleashed it on everyone I know, just trying to work out some formatting first.

  3. morninglightmama

    November 16, 2010 at 2:40 PM

    I love the freshness of this idea– you’re starting at square one on this journey and we’ll be able to follow your experiences from the very beginning. Just like the image above, the blank pages lay ahead, waiting to be filled in. Yay!!

    • suddenwriteturn

      November 16, 2010 at 5:55 PM

      Thank you, I am so grateful for your blog advice! And, the image above is my actual journal!

Trackbacks

  1. Time « Sudden.Write.Turn. says:
    October 2, 2011 at 5:50 PM

    […] summer I decided to change my life. I had done nearly everything I was “supposed” to do and felt like it was time to do what I […]

  2. Catch a squirrel, change your life. Same difference. « Sudden.Write.Turn. says:
    September 26, 2011 at 10:15 PM

    […] has been six months since I decided to change my life and three months since I began SuddenWriteTurn. The emotions that led up to my decision were tinged […]

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