2011 in Review

Last year was a big one for me.  Most of these didn’t feel very mon­u­men­tal at the time, but I made some enor­mous changes and deci­sions in my life. Each of these deserves their own blog post, but at the rate I’ve been going, I doubt it’ll hap­pen. So, here’s the sum­mary of the biggies:

1. I quit my job. This is a pat­tern of behav­ior with me. I was unhappy for a num­ber of rea­sons, some that were the fault of with the work­place I was in, but many more that orig­i­nated with me. Basi­cally, though, I decided life was too short to be that freak­ing mis­er­able.  This one move was the cat­a­lyst for many other changes.

2. I wrote out a mis­sion state­ment.   After I left the job, I took a good month and a half, liv­ing off of vaca­tion time at my old job and other sav­ings, to decide what was next. A big part of this process was more intro­spec­tion that I’m gen­er­ally com­fort­able with. It turns out, love and free­dom are the two most impor­tant con­cepts in every­thing I do.

Writ­ing out my mis­sion state­ment helped me to finally get an idea of what I wanted to do with my life. Not just career, but what my ideal life would look like.  All things in my life will flow from pur­su­ing this set of goals. Because I finally gave this the time and effort it deserved, I got to the root of why my life looked so direc­tion­less. If I hadn’t taken the time for this step, I prob­a­bly would still be stuck in the spin cycle.

3. I decided not to go back to school.  One of the avenues I’ve con­sid­ered, his­tor­i­cally, is going back to school and get­ting that engi­neer­ing degree, or an MBA, or any num­ber of fur­ther edu­ca­tional goals, depend­ing on my cur­rent thought processes.  Writ­ing out that mis­sion state­ment helped me to see why I want to go back to school, and how to get the same ful­fill­ment that I’m seek­ing from fur­ther edu­ca­tion, with­out invest­ing sig­nif­i­cant amounts of time and energy to sim­ply put me back in some­one else’s work pool (and back to dis­em­pow­ered mis­ery) again.

3. I went to work for myself. I per­son­ally can­not stand hand­ing over con­trol of my time, energy, thought processes, moral­ity, you name it. That is the biggest rea­son for my habit of quit­ting jobs.  I want to be in charge of myself. From now own, I’ll at least be able to blame myself if I have to work over, miss an impor­tant date, don’t make what I think I’m worth, or am bored or unfulfilled.

This is risky but huge in terms of my daily peace of mind. For years I resisted the idea that I’m an entre­pre­neur­ial type, because I craved secu­rity, and felt I needed some­one to give me goals.  Turns out a client can proved the sec­ond as well as an employer, and secu­rity is over­rated. The work vac­il­lates wildly.  I have worked on some really fun projects, and some really bor­ing ones over the past six months. Some weeks I dou­ble my old income, and oth­ers, I make noth­ing.  Some­times I get 4 hours of sleep a night because I have too much work, and other times I have noth­ing to do but look for more to do.  I have some things in the works right now that could mean a lot of money down the road, but lit­tle to noth­ing right now.  No mat­ter. I can sleep at night. I don’t cry on my way to work.

4. I wrote a novel.  Yes!  I did fin­ish NaNoW­riMo.  This is the one blog post I’m def­i­nitely going to write later. I learned so much from it.

5.  I decided to try and have another kid.  So far, no dice, and I’m okay with that, too.  We’ll see how that works out.

6. I painted my first paint­ing.  Really, I stopped pro­cras­ti­nat­ing, and started act­ing on those projects that I’ve always wanted to do. I bought a sewing machine and sewed some pil­lows, and then popped five nee­dles in a row and threw up my hands in exas­per­a­tion. I painted our fur­ni­ture to all look the same.  Chris and I put up book­shelves, which didn’t end up exactly like I imag­ined, but is still a source of great joy to me.

Paint­ing was not any­thing I thought I would enjoy, or have any abil­ity at, but I joined a girl­friend for her birth­day din­ner. She wanted to go to a Painted by U ses­sion where we made our own ver­sions of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. I had a freak­ing blast, and while no one will con­fuse my art with some­thing actu­ally good just yet, it was amaz­ing to just do it. I bought some paints and can­vasses over the Christ­mas break, and painted my first orig­i­nal for the Spousal Unit for Christ­mas.  I’m going to keep this one up, for myself.