Only The Curious

I’m moving to Colorado.
The following is a re-post from my other blog about my upcoming move to Colorado, originally posted on 5/27/09.

Anyone who has known me at any point over the last 12 years has heard me say this about a bajillion times. But this time, I mean it. For reals.

I’m moving to Colorado in August.

The first question everyone I tell about my move asks me is: “what are you going to do in Colorado?” It is, after all, the most sensible and polite question to ask.

I usually respond with a blank look while my internal monologue does the following: “I have no idea. I have no idea what I am going to do in Colorado. What am I going to do? What am I going to say to this person? Quick brain, come up with SOMETHING!” Unfortunately, I think my blank look comes across as “why are you asking me such a stupid question?” Which I feel bad about, because I don’t want to make people feel bad for asking me questions, even if they are stupid. Really it’s more that because I don’t have a good answer for the question, I hate it when people ask that. Which they do. Every time.

So now my response, accompanied by said blank stare, is “um, live there.”

Which, of course, gets followed up by more questions I don’t really have answers to:

“Well do you have a job lined up or anything?”

Most sensible people do not pick up and move across the country if it’s not for a job or a great love or family. I am leaving my family and my great love (more about that in a minute) and I don’t have a job lined up; I don’t even know what kind of job I want.

Part of me is really hoping to find a full-time job with an innovative company where I can make a decent paycheck and have health insurance and work with people and occasionally do interesting, creative things. The other part of me wants to “wing it” as a freelancer or start my own business as an event planner, so that I can still travel all the time, because now I will have 3 cities I want to visit all of the time instead of one. But that’s a terrible idea, because Boulder is way more expensive than Madison and I’m not making my living as a freelancer now.

So I’ve settled on setting an intention for whatever would be best for me to show up. I’m going to go out there and just see what happens. I can always serve coffee or do massages if I need to stretch my savings until Mr. Right in job form comes along.

Now befuddled at my apparently random decision making process, the person asks “so why are you going to Colorado?”

I grew up in Colorado, and I decided the day I left that someday I’d go back. So it’s just this ingrained psychological thing about returning home, even though Madison feels way more like home at this point. In some ways, I need to go just so I can cross it off my “life list” and get on to whatever I want to do next.

But the important part isn’t that I’m going to Colorado, it’s that I’m going. The best reasons I can give are that I am moving because I am 27 and not married and have no real reason not to.

I will concede that I have plenty of reasons to stay. My family’s here. Ian’s here. Madison is a fabulous place to live. I have a lot of friends I really care about, and my local professional network is pretty solid. I often wish I could just be happy to stay here and get married and start my own business. It would be great.

But as Ian said once, staying would slowly kill me from the inside. I need to go do this just because I’ve always wanted to, and I would always wonder what would’ve happened if I’d done it. And I do not want to be one of those senior citizens who says “oh I wish I’d done that when I was your age, but then I got married…”

Speaking of marriage, the last question they ask is “So is Ian going with you?”

I am always caught off-guard by this one, just because I’m surprised at how many people know that I’m in a relationship, that it’s a serious relationship, and that they care about my business that much. And I know that they care, because they are usually devastated when I say “no.”

This is followed up by a lengthy explanation about how Ian’s not coming with me because I have always wanted to just go and strike it out on my own and he loves me enough not to deprive me of that. More to the point, he and I have been together for two years and we’re really happy and we’ve talked about getting married and while everyone else in the world thinks this is exactly why I should plant myself here and marry him, I think that means it’s the perfect time for us to be apart for a bit. I don’t want to get married because I happened to be in a good relationship around the time that most people get married. I want to get married because I go to Colorado and I date other people and I realize I can’t possibly live without him.

Or its possible that I get out there and realize I can live without him and then I will have avoided marrying someone I’m later going to leave because I’m still wondering what would’ve happened if I’d gone to Colorado and if I was supposed to meet someone there instead.

You know, pretending there’s “the one” and that romance is fated and all that stuff that I don’t really belive in but romanticize anyway.

But back to the point:  I’m moving to Colorado. In August. To live there. No, I don’t have a job lined up, and I don’t know what kind of job I’m looking for, if any. Ian is not coming with me. Yes, I will miss you all. I promise to visit. And yes, you better come visit me because I will be living in the land of awesome.

Tweet This Post

I used to have anxiety attacks. All the time.

Walking to class, talking on the phone with my mother, sitting alone in my dorm room, I’d be thinking about my day, or my plans, or my life, and it would crash over me like a wave. My hands would sweat, my stomach would feel knotted, I’d get lightheaded.

There were lots of reasons for this anxiety. But I think it really came down to one thing: I wasn’t living my life the way I wanted it.

I wasn’t living my life the way I wanted it, because I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know myself well. I had lived most of my life doing what other people had told me to, assuming the great mystery of why would reveal itself at some point.

For the first 23 years of my life I went to school, worked hard, got good grades. I was president of student councils, wrote for school papers, sang in choir and even tried a sport or two. I was working hard to do what everyone told me to.

But I had no idea why, or what I was trying to accomplish. Just this vague concept that if I worked hard and went to a good college and had a solid resume, things would fall into place. I figured that sometime during college I would find something I loved, and that would be my career, and I would be successful at it.

But the great epiphany never came. There was no life-changing professor to steer me in the right direction. There hadn’t even been an advisor with a decent recommendation on hand. People would ask what kind of work I was looking for, and I didn’t have a good answer. I didn’t have any answer.

All I knew was that, now that I had a degree, it was not acceptable to work as a barista indefinitely. And secretly, I also knew that I did not want a traditional office job; something I learned during a fabulous internship my freshman year – I knew that if I hated just interning at what should have been a fantastic place to work, there was no way I’d ever love any office job. But somehow, if I told people that I didn’t want a “real” job, it made overachiever, overambitious me into a slacker in their eyes.

So I job hopped, which I now like to think of as conducting field research into how I like to work. For the first time since I was able to respond to the question “what do you want to do with your life” with “be a ballerina-rockstar-astronaut-anthropologist-writer-butterfly” I have an answer.

It’s taken a lot of introspection. My meditation practice has helped with that immensely. So has doing a lot of reading and writing, attending workshops, and finding like-minded people who are doing what I want to do.

My answer is that I don’t want to do any one thing. I love variety. I like moving around. I like interacting with and helping people. I also like writing. I don’t like limitations. I don’t want to be limited to doing one thing, every day. I don’t want to be limited to staying in one place for 8 hours at a time. And I definitely don’t want to have the number of days I can travel decided for me.

So it has been amazing me to discover the likes of Chris Gillebeau, Lea Woodward, Barbara Winter, and many others who have made it okay to not want a traditional office job. I feel like I’ve “found my lost tribe” as my mother would put it  – people who are their own bosses, who are location independent, who realize that working and living your life shouldn’t be on opposite sides of the coin. People who make their money from lots of different sources, and who value experiences over objects. People who realize that true ambition is living life the way you really want to, rather than putting in your face time and calling it a day.

I look forward to sharing my experiences as I work to transition out of the traditional workforce and into a life of adventure and fulfillment.

Tweet This Post

I know people who insist that they can’t use up their vacation days. (I know, right?) They tell me  they have nowhere to go. Or they don’t have anyone to go with. Occasionally they’ll take a day off just because they can. And they end up calling to see if I want to have lunch, because by noon they’re bored of being at home.

To me, this is because they are looking at it from the wrong perspective. They’ve already decided that vacation days need to look a certain way – that they have to have somewhere they want to go, and they have to go there with a specific person (or kind of person.) Rather than exploring the possibilities of what they could do on their own, or other things they could do with their vacation (like volunteer abroad, maybe) they just choose to be bored. And disappointed. And bored.

(Sidenote: Can we PLEASE come up with a system where they can transfer their wasted unused days to people like me, who will use them very, very well?)

Obviously, there are places they could go. Anywhere in the world, really. There are group trips individuals can sign up to go on. Or I bet if they called up grandma and said “hey, let’s hang out in your favorite city for a few days” she’d oblige. But they don’t see these possibilities. From their perspective, there really is no place they want to go, or the only people they’d want to bother traveling with aren’t around.

If they chose to look at it differently, they’d see other possibilities. The world would open up.

So choose how you want to see the world today. Are you going to decide it’s a bad day because it’s not what you wanted, or are you going to be excited to explore something unexpected?

Only the curious have something to find. Are you going to be curious?

Tweet This Post