Only The Curious

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.

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