June 2023, man, that was a time, wasn’t it? A lot of chatter about what was next for everyone’s careers, especially if you were a Virgo. People were looking for signs, for clarity, for a path forward. And honestly, I was right there in the thick of it, trying to figure things out for myself.
My work at the time, it was… okay. Stable, paid the bills, decent enough folks around. But that gnawing feeling, you know the one? The one that tells you something just ain’t right, that you’re not really hitting your stride. I’d been ignoring it for a while, telling myself it was just a phase, or that I was being ungrateful. I kept thinking, “Just stick it out, it’ll get better.” But by June 2023, that voice was getting louder, a persistent hum in my head.
I was stuck. Really stuck. Every morning felt like slogging through mud. I tried everything – reading up on career changes, listening to podcasts, even those cheesy online quizzes about what job suits your personality. Nothing really clicked. It felt like I was just spinning my wheels, and the harder I pushed, the more tangled up I got.
Why was I so deep in this mess, you ask?
Well, just around that time, life threw a curveball that made all my career worries shrink. My youngest kid, she got really sick. Nothing life-threatening in the long run, thank goodness, but for a few weeks there, it was touch and go. Hospital visits every day, nights sleeping in a chair next to her bed. My job, my career aspirations, all that “what’s next” nonsense – it just evaporated. All that mattered was her getting better. That whole experience, sitting there, watching her fight, made everything else feel so trivial, so meaningless.
When she finally started to turn the corner, and we were back home, I looked at my usual routine, my old job, and it just felt different. The passion was gone. Not like it was completely there before, but now it was utterly, totally absent. I realized I’d been letting fear – fear of the unknown, fear of not having a steady paycheck, fear of change – dictate my life. My kid’s scare, it ripped the band-aid off. It made me see that life is too short to just tolerate things, especially your work, which takes up so much of your waking hours.
So, I started small. I didn’t quit my job right away, no way. That’s just not practical. But I started looking. Really looking this time. Not just for jobs that paid well, but for things that actually piqued my interest. Things I used to enjoy, hobbies I’d let fall by the wayside. I began to:
- Dig into my old notebooks. Found sketches, ideas, half-baked plans from years ago. Stuff I’d completely forgotten about.
- Talk to people. Not just about job openings, but about what they loved about their work, what got them excited. I reached out to old friends, former colleagues, even just folks I met at social gatherings.
- Take online courses, just for fun. Nothing too serious, just dipping my toes into areas I always thought were interesting but never had the time for. Learning how to edit videos, messing around with some simple web design tools.
- Give myself permission to fail. This was a big one. I realized part of my hang-up was the fear of making the wrong move. I decided it was okay to try something and find out it wasn’t for me.
It wasn’t a quick fix, not by a long shot. It was a slow, deliberate chipping away at all the assumptions I’d built up over the years about what my career should be. I started recognizing patterns in what truly engaged me: problem-solving, creating something from scratch, helping people directly.
Eventually, through a series of unexpected connections, one of those random conversations I had led to a freelance gig. Then another. It wasn’t exactly what I thought I’d be doing, but it used the skills I found enjoyable, and it gave me the flexibility I never knew I craved. Slowly but surely, I pieced together enough work that I could finally make the jump and leave that old job behind.
It was terrifying, but also exhilarating. That June 2023 feeling of being at a crossroads, unsure what was next? It turned into a journey of rediscovery, forced by a jolt from life itself. Sometimes you need to be pushed right to the edge before you finally jump and find out you can actually fly. My career didn’t just turn a corner; it totally re-routed onto a different highway, and it feels a whole lot more like my own road now.
