I want to change my life.

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.