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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.