I remember looking at that thing, man. May 2023. I wasn’t even into all that zodiac crap, but my buddy sent the link over, and the title just hit me different: Big Life Changes are Coming! I laughed, scrolled past it, and then, not even twenty minutes later, my whole Monday got absolutely wrecked.
The Kick-Off – When the Bottom Dropped Out
I’d been sitting on my couch, pretending to be busy on the laptop, when the email dropped. Urgent. Mandatory meeting. You know how those things smell a mile away. It wasn’t even five minutes into the video call before the big boss started spitting out all that nonsense about “synergies” and “refocusing core competencies.” Yeah, right. I knew instantly they were about to swing the axe. I’d been at that same desk for seven years, just coasting, comfortable, waiting for the weekend. I thought I was fine, totally safe, but that email just pulled the rug right out from under me. I closed my laptop. I just couldn’t look at the corporate chat window anymore. I was done.
My first move? I didn’t immediately freak out. I poured a fresh cup of coffee and literally sat there for an hour, just staring at the peeling paint on the wall. Then I remembered that stupid Virgo line. Maybe it was some kind of cosmic push. I decided right then I wouldn’t let them cut me; I’d cut myself first. So I made a list. Not a serious, fancy spreadsheet list—just a quick, rough one on the back of an envelope:
- Quit the job, officially, before they fired me.
- Grab the boxes from the attic.
- Call the broker about that little upstate cabin.
- Figure out what the heck I actually wanted to do with my weekdays.
The Great Throwing-Out Practice
The next couple of weeks were pure, unadulterated chaos, and it was glorious. I officially quit before they could even get the severance package sorted, which, looking back, was probably financially dumb, but man, did it feel good. I didn’t wait around for the paperwork; I started purging my apartment. I mean purging. I felt like the whole place was suffocating me, every little trinket a reminder of a life I was just floating through.
I took everything I owned and threw it into three piles. This wasn’t a neat, organized process. I was pulling stuff out of closets, slamming it onto the floor, and deciding in ten seconds flat where it went. I remember finding an entire box of old client reports and print-outs—I didn’t even shred them; I just dumped the whole mess straight into a trash bag. It was intense, almost angry.
- Keep (Things I would actually use in the next six months—mostly clothes and basic cookware).
- Sell (The big gaming consoles, the power tools I never touched, the decent furniture that just took up room).
- Trash (All the random crap I’d collected over seven years—old cables, broken chargers, dusty magazines).
I must have hauled four giant bags of clothes down to the donation bin. I sold the big TV to a kid down the street for fifty bucks, no haggling. I just wanted it GONE. I took the entire weekend and just hammered through the garage. I organized all my old client files, the stuff I’d saved “just in case,” and hit the delete button on almost everything from the last few years. Every action felt like ripping an old, sticky bandage off. I didn’t feel relief right away; it was just raw exhaustion, the kind that feels honest.
Changing the Scenery and Doing the Real Work
Once the apartment felt empty—and I mean really echoingly empty—I drove upstate. It was a tiny, old cabin my family used to own, but it had been sitting vacant for almost a year. The internet connection was terrible, and the heating was sketchy, but it was quiet. I drove up there with maybe ten boxes of essentials and my dog. That was it. I shut the city life down completely. I didn’t even tell most people where I was going.
I spent the first month and a half just fixing things around the place. I didn’t look at a job board or update my professional profiles. I got up every morning and looked for something broken. I fixed a leaky faucet that had been dripping for months. I replaced a few broken floorboards on the porch. The biggest job was in the living room: I ripped out the ugly old mustard-yellow carpet and spent three whole days sanding the wood underneath until my back was screaming. I was using my hands for the first time in years, doing real, physical work. The kind of work you can look at at the end of the day and say, “I did that. It’s done.” There’s something about seeing the fresh sawdust and the actual finished, clean wood that a successful PowerPoint slide never gives you.
The Simple Landing
The big pivot happened maybe two months in. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and I was up on a ladder trying to clean the gutters when my old colleague, Mark, called. He’d left the big company a year before and was starting his own small development shop, just him and a few guys. They were swamped. He asked if I’d do some quick freelance consulting for them to help them catch up. I told him straight up: I wouldn’t do the old kind of reporting and management stuff. I only wanted to focus on the new, simple back-end coding stuff I’d been learning just for fun, the stuff I’d been messing with during lunch breaks for years.
He didn’t even skip a beat. He just said, “Perfect. We need that kind of focus. Start tomorrow.”
I took that simple offer. No benefits, no fancy sick leave, just working off my little desk looking out at the woods, paid hourly. It wasn’t the glamorous “big life change” the horoscope maybe meant—no winning the lottery or moving to a beach resort—but it was my change. I forced it. I walked away from the steady, safe money and stepped into something completely quiet and self-made. That whole horoscope thing was just a stupid piece of paper that showed up at the right time, but it was the day I stopped sitting still and actually started moving. The chaos finally paid off. And looking back now, I wouldn’t trade the mess for anything, not even the bad internet connection.
