Oh, you know. When I wasn’t successfully changing my career’s direction I was drowning in wedding plans. Just the usual. But I will be back…very soon. Promise.
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…and instead, put my life on a successful and fulfilling career path. That is Resolution #2 for 2010.  I’ve mentioned many a time how hateful I find my current job. Over the past year I must have applied for 50 jobs. But despite my education and work experience, nobody is hiring in this economy, not even entry level positions with salaries that would leave me barely able to pay the rent. It’s depressing. I should know, because I let this apparent failure on my part depress me for a good chuck of last year. I felt like I had no options available to me, like I wasn’t even hireable for the crappiest crappy job that was really no better than the crappy dead-end job I currently have. Worst was that few of the jobs I was being rejected for were even things that I really wanted to do. So I started thinking real hard and doing some soul searching. After a while the answer became so clear that I wondered how I couldn’t have known what I wanted to do with my career the whole time. I’m going to be a Professional Organizer and Interior Decorator. I’ve always been madly obsessed with organizing and making things more useful and functional. I’ve also always had an eye for aesthetics and seem to know when things go together and when they don’t. Looking at catalogues or magazines, I put together possibilities in my mind’s eye. In every room I enter, I look at what works and what doesn’t and how it could be made better. It’s what comes naturally, and what I should be doing as a career. So that’s my second resolution for 2010: to stop being afraid, to take the plunge into doing what I love and to work at it every day until I have successfully established myself in the field. It’s gonna take a lot of hard work, maybe some night school, and a lot of believing in myself even when I have nothing to show for it. But if I’m ever gonna have a career it has to be started now. I just gotta remember to take baby steps until I get there. Well, I’ve definitely decided that telecommuting is worth giving another try. Though it is gonna take some getting used to, finding a new routine. I’ve been telecommuting for a few days now, but inevitably I’ve been spending the whole day in my PJs and feeling out of whack because of it. Today I’m trying something different. Attempting to ignore the pressure to begin work immediately upon waking up and instead starting when I’m good and ready. (Read “showered.”) I think part of the reason why the transition has been so hard and why it didn’t work before was because I’ve been trying to keep my hours up. But for me, working from home can’t be about putting in 40-hour weeks all the time any more, or I might as well be working in the office. Changing one’s mindset is hard. And it’s harder than it sounds, acting as though you already are the person you want to be. Maybe I’m half way to pretending. Somewhere near that mid-lifechange point. There’s still a lot of prep work to be done and routines to be hammered out and some definite cleaning of my apparently neglected apartment to wade through, but perhaps once those things are in place it will be easier to wake up believing that I already am who I want to be. I just need to give myself more time. Time to settle in, time to clean up and time to focus on making plans for actually starting my career. Time to enjoy Christmas would be a nice bonus, too. And keeping crazy hours at my current job is not gonna help me with that. So really, what this is is time to let go. I don’t have to be the best at that job anymore because now, I’m learning to be the best at something else. Okay, so, it’s no secret: I HATE MY JOB. I hate it up one side and down the other. I can’t even remember when I stopped liking it and started hating it. Was it one year ago? Two? More? And yet, I’ve been fighting with myself about it despite wanting to quit. I guess the big problem is that I don’t wanna let a certain love of my life down. I feel like if I quit or even just cut back on hours before having a new job perfectly lined up to pay all the bills he’d be disappointed or worse. Don’t get me wrong, I know money is “important.” But with my current crappy job we are JUST paying the bills. No savings. No buffer. No spending money, even. And the problem is, with this job sucking away all my time (and me working way too hard for almost nothing) it leaves no time to look for a new job, start a business, or develop my passions. All I do is work and eat and sleep, work and eat and sleep. No balance. No hope. No future. And I know most people think that should be okay and be enough. I mean, I should feel lucky and privileged just to have a job at all in this economy, right? Because it seems like the general consensus is that money is more important than everything, even saving yourself from sinking into depression because you’ve ended up living a completely unfulfilling life. Well, I guess money isn’t my only reason for sticking around at this crummy job. I really do like the people I work with, although most of them are gone already or headed out the door, at least. That shouldn’t really be a reason though. I shouldn’t stay in a job I hate for other people. But any way I turn, there doesn’t seem to be a way out of this situation. No matter where I look it’s the same: I need money. I guess there may be one way to ease my troubles. If I telecommute to the office there would be fewer wasted hours in my day. More time for the things that really matter. And the more I make those things matter, the possibly less I will have to work that hellish job. My only problem is that I tried that once before and the stress and deadlines of the job had me working in my PJs all day, unable to even take the time to walk my dog when she sat crying by the door with a full bladder. I guess it was the pressure not to disappoint or perhaps my inability to say “NO, THIS IS TOO MUCH WORK.” Or, you know, just to have the self-worth to put myself first over any crummy job making demands on my time. I was always super-distracted too because EVERYTHING in my life is way more important (in my eyes) than this horrible job, so it always felt like such a waste of time, working, when I could have been doing more important things, money notwithstanding. But I can’t keep hemming and hawing forever. I need to pull the trigger, make a choice, set a direction and follow it. I need to stop feeling bad or thinking “what if” or hoping that a change will find me all on it’s own. Yes, money is important, but is it important at the expense of my future? I always thought that everything would be so much easier once I finished university, but it just seems to have gotten that much more complicated. Building a career is a lifetime commitment and there are no mid-semester breaks. There is no half-assing it if you want to be successful. You have to believe it and just do it. Don’t let money make you scared or you will spend your entire life living in fear (like I have.) I can’t do that anymore. I can’t be okay with that being my life. I can’t spend all my time worrying about what other people will think. The Year of Freedom is almost over, gone before it every really began. By this time next year I’ll be 30 and I’ll be married. So maybe it’s time to stop dreaming of who I’ll be when I grow up and start living my life being that person. I read a blog post the other day from a very talented artist. Her words were simple: Fake it till you make it. Pretend that you’re already the person that you want to be and one day you’ll wake up and you won’t be pretending anymore. That’s just who you’ll be. I didn’t really sleep that well last night. I woke up around 3 AM and never really got back to sleep. Just too much on my mind, I guess. But it was good in a way, I had time to think. And so I’ve decided that though I may have been up for hours already by that point, when dawn finally broke this morning I stopped being Sarah: wussy-faced whiner and chronic daydreamer. Instead, I became Sarah: professional organizer and interior decorator. If 2009 was the Year of Freedom, 2010 will be the Year of Change. You can bet your bottom dollar on that. I know I will be. Safe or happy? Safe? Or happy? That was the question that was twirling around my mind on the way home from physio yesterday. Do I choose a play-it-safe life or do I choose one that’s happy and fulfilled? Is there a way to choose both? And what keeps holding me back from being my authentic self? From leading the life I’ve always wanted to live? From doing what will make me happy rather than continuously falling back into bad old habits. That is one of my biggest fears right now, that after this whole month-long experience is over, I’ll simply go back to work and nothing will have changed. How do I be that person and live that life that I always dreamed of? What makes it so significantly different from the life I’ve been leading? The answers to these questions are, I think, the next big list that I want to tackle. I like lists. They work for me and often help me pinpoint the swirling thoughts in my head. I just need to do some good, hard thinking about the whole thing. Because I want to be the one leading my life, making the conscious choices and decisions. I do not want my life to be leading me. Ever. So, at the end of my first week of freedom, where do I stand? I’m all but phlegm-free for one. But has any progress been made? What have I learned about myself and what I want? Well… I like this slower pace. I like not having headaches all the time. I like quiet mornings and quiet evenings and busy in-betweens. I don’t like downtown Toronto, would rather live in the country but will settle for someplace far enough away from the core as soon as I can afford a car. Because while a car is crazy expensive, my time is worth too much to commute from the fringes by transit. I really dislike not having a private yard, so I’m still toying with the idea of moving. We’ll stay here until October and see where we stand at that point. Maybe I’ll wait till spring if the new jobs are within commuting distance from here. Because I do need a different job. I don’t think that, in general, I will mind working hard enough and long enough at a job to get the things I want, but I hate my current job with its harsh deadlines, zero respect and the inability to ever get a raise or promotion. I think a lot of my unhappiness has been coming from feeling trapped in that job and the stagnating version of my life that is the direct result. I just have to keep applying. It doesn’t matter if I’ve applied for a million jobs and heard from none, all that matters is that I keep trying and keep applying. I mean, someone’s gonna have to hire me eventually. I just need to keep trying and not let myself get discouraged when I don’t hear anything. Because I can’t control everything in the universe. Shocking, I know. But I actually have very little say about what inevitably happens, so I need to start trying to let go of my stranglehold on events and trust instead that things will work out. And part two of that is to stop holding on to so much stuff, all in the chance that I might need it one day. Holding onto things just in case or for sentimental value never leaves room in your life for wonderful new things to come in! So I’m thinking of doing some reorganizing and purging while I have the time. It may be slow goings though, since I’m trying to really think about the purpose and the function of everything. Well, that’s all I’ve got for this week. It seems like a lot of good stuff to have figured out already, considering I’ve been so sick. Here’s hoping that the rest of my time off is equally productive. So yesterday was something, that’s for sure. After that last post, I started looking up all sorts of stuff about the countryside. Then my mind turned towards farming and how cool it would be to have an organic micro-ecofarm. I even asked Dave what he though about it. But like the level-headed half of this partnership that he is, he stayed typically reserved and noncommittal. Well, I went back to my research, looking all sorts of things up. But the more I researched, the less sure I became. What if this was me grasping at anything again? How could one buy and start a farm with a negative amount of money in the bank, anyway? And that inevitably led to another meltdown. I ended up crying, feeling trapped by my lack of choices in life, worrying about the future, and upset with myself that I’d tried to grasp onto another harebrained scheme again when I promised myself I’d stop doing that. Seeing my distress once again, Dave sat me down. He said, “Look, I think you’re trying to jump from Step 1 to Step 3 without going through Step 2. Getting to where we wanna be in life is gonna take a lot of hard work and sacrifice, more than we’ve had to do in the past. But you need to be prepared. It’s like that old equation says, any project can only be two of these three things: done with high quality, done on time or done on budget. If you want something of high quality done on time, it’s gonna cost you. If you want something done fast and cheap, you forgo quality, and if you opt for high quality done on the cheap (which is probably a good analogy for what we want from life) it’s gonna take a long time to get there.” Longer than, oh, the five minutes I generally have been giving myself. What can I say, patience has never been one of my virtues. We continued talking, Dave trying to make me feel better, and me trying to be okay with our current lot in life. I eventually came around to the realization that I end up so easily grasping onto all these random career paths because none of my life goals actually have anything to do with a career. My dreams for a self-sufficient life of gardening, baking and child-rearing has zero to do with working for the man or climbing the corporate ladder. “So,” Dave said, “maybe what you need is some crap job to help you get from here to there. Maybe that’s what we both need.” But we already have crap jobs that pay more than a lot of crap jobs and we barely scrape enough money together every month. “Ah, yes,” he said, “but we currently have dead-end crap jobs. What we need are crap jobs with some growth potential.” So that’s the point we’re at now, thinking about looking for crap jobs with growth potential so that we can scrimp our way from here to a home we can fix up, with a huge yard and/or a little bit of land. So that one day I can feel like something of a suburban homesteader: growing things, making things, raising children and being happy. That’s the real goal. And the real detriment to our current jobs, since it is unlikely that we well ever get another raise or promotion there. We instead just remain in a holding pattern, able to pay most of the monthly bills but forever hounded by the thousands of dollars of impenetrable school debt I have. (Hard to believe, huh, that we both have respected university degrees and we’ve come to the conclusion that all we can hope for in life is getting a crap job?) Maybe we’ll have to move to a basement in Scarborough, cancel the phones and the cable TV. There are some debts that can’t be reduced, that we’ll just have to keep paying till they’re gone, like our gym debt. It was a good idea, and I’m happy we did it, but getting a trainer at the gym was, in all honesty, way beyond what we could afford and I shouldn’t have made us do it. We all live with the consequences of our actions, I guess. So I have a month to figure out how to live the next five years on the cheap. Somewhere in there getting rid of my $40,000 school debt, saving a down payment for a home and perhaps even starting a family. Cloth diapers are still nouveau-chic, right?  Trying to compare the countryside life I see in British books, movies, magazines and TV to the Ontario countryside is like night and day. (Though, admittedly, I have no experience with one and very little experience with the other.) The Ontario countryside that I’ve experienced is, frankly, little more than urban sprawl. Outside of Toronto is the GTA, which seems to be another name for vast subdivisions of hastily erected houses on too-cramped lots, close by newly erected Smart Centres. (You know, those giant parking lots ringed with various big-box stores.) There doesn’t seem to be any town life or career opportunity close to home out there. It just seems to be nothing but a holding pen for middle-class families whose parents commute the hours a day into the city for their office jobs. Ugh. And beyond that are aging towns whose young people have moved on to greener, concrete-laden pastures. My view may be admittedly biased but it is the view from here: living outside of Toronto is career suicide. All may know my great dislike for city living. The longer I live here, the less I find things appealing. Especially in this internet age when one can have almost anything shipped straight to their door by Canada Post. In fact, if I could figure out a way to make a living in the country doing something with my hands and my mind that didn’t require a two-hour daily commute back into the city, I think I would do it. The what has never seemed quite as important as the where. Probably because there are a lot of things I could do that would make me perfectly content and have nothing to do with a computer or a six-lane highway. However, one cannot live in the country unless one owns a car. (Or wishes to be completely cut off permanently from the outside world.) Also, I doubt Dave would appreciate the country life as much as I would, nor would he appreciate leaving all our friends behind in the city. But the more I think about it, the more I wish it were possible. I mean, I know very little about Western or Eastern Ontario. My only experience, as I said, is with the GTA, north to Muskoka and east to Peterborough. An admittedly small sample to be making such broad deductions with. Perhaps I can do a little research. Because I think that the longer I stay in the city, the unhappier I feel. And since I can’t really move to the British countryside anytime soon, this may be a good start. I did it! I talked to my boss about taking a month off. He was really supportive and is totally gonna let me do it. Already I feel some of the weight lifting and a glimmer of hope rising out of the abyss.  It’s the last day of the month, and what a ridiculous month it was. Have you ever thought your hip was broken? And been under the age of 65? No? Now imagine how I felt when, at the ripe old age of 28, the doctor told me that I had a fractured hip. Yeah, exactly. Thankfully, it was a false alarm, but you can see why I’ve been a bit distracted from my blogging lately. But it’s amazing how freeing and motivating it can be to find out that you don’t need surgery. Tomorrow, Dave and I go for our gym orientation, which means I can cross another goal off my New Year’s Resolutions. I’m actually really excited to go and start working out. I just wanna sweat, you know? I wanna burn up a bunch of calories getting my heart rate up, then go home and take a hot shower and relax. Oh, by the way, I’m up for my dream job! After two interviews, I’m waiting to hear the final (?) word whether or not I get the job. I’m trying to think really positive thoughts. But truly, I feel like this job is mine, like this job and I were made for each other. It’s almost more excitement and anxiety than I can bare. But patience is a virtue, so I just need to stay calm and wait a few more days. Six at the most. It seems like a long time, but will probably fly by considering I have a lot of catching up to do around the house. There was a lot of stuff that sort of fell by the wayside when I though my hip was broken. Now that I know it’s not, it’s time to pick up all those dropped balls and get back on that horse! (Can you say “mixed metaphors”?) |
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