1: Vacuumed and cleaned today, and got to spend all day with that feel-good feeling of a clean house around you. ^_^
2: The weather was stunning today, and I had nowhere better to be than lounging around in it.
3: I truly do have an amazing job. I enjoy it, it challenges me, and I know I’m making a difference, both for the bottom line of the college where I work and for the students and scientists. It’s the kind of job that people talk about when they say, “If you love what you do, then it never feels like work.” Well…truthfully it does feel like work, but it feels like work you WANT to do, which makes all the difference. I had a hell of a week this past week, but I knew it was only in passing, and that furthermore a lot of it was due to the overabundance of success in the past couple of weeks, and most importantly that it was WORTH it.
If you’re wondering how you get a job like this, incidentally, I got mine by working my butt off for it. I decided somewhere around 2006, working a job that was already beginning to impact me from long-term stress and unhappiness, that I wasn’t going to rest until I got a job and career I loved. I then spent two years searching for a field that I could both enjoy and make money in, another year and a half preparing and researching for grad school, another two years mining grad school for everything I could get out of it, and finally a year on the job market while I filled my time with short-term freelance work, refusing to settle for positions that sounded only kind of okay. It took a lot of preparation and a fair amount of luck, and more than once I had months of abject terror and anxiety as I jumped into the void and trusted that I’d land safely.
It was not easy, and I did it because I knew that my long-term happiness and security were at stake. I am not a person who CAN work in a job I don’t love for very long without it impacting my physical health. It all started with me confronting that and admitting to it, and then deciding what I needed instead.
But listen. It wasn’t ONLY luck. Those times when I cast myself into the void, it wasn’t at random. I looked at my goal and what it would take to get there. I lined up the skills and resources I’d need. I looked at the risks and did things to minimize or survive them as much as possible, lined up as many points in my favor as I could manage, and then sweated through the wait and anxiety attacks to discover the fruits of my work. A change like this is terrifying. A goal like this is huge. But it IS something you can orchestrate.
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