Follow My Heart

The last time I was here, fiddling around in my pensamientos area of free thoughts I had just quit my job and was dealing with all the emotions that come with a big vocal move.

Since then a lot has happened. I was going to document the process here but things went in a different direction. I looked at quite possibly three hundred jobs, applied to maybe thirty-five of them. Some were silly, some were reach jobs - like the Communications Director for Clackamas Fire. But if I know one thing about myself it’s that I’ve proven to myself over and over again that I really can do anything.

Still, with every application, I would go from excitement to applicant remorse. Nothing felt right. I would apply, sometimes with minutes left in the application period, putting in every effort, crafting cover letters and then… application sent and heart sunk.

I’m a pisces and I’m used to going with the flow. I’m used to swimming with the currents and seeing what’s around the bend instead of taking out my machete and forging my path over the mountain. But this felt like I was having some kind of crisis. Was it hormones? Was the family mood disorder finally catching up with me?

My birthday came around and I breathed a sigh of relief. And I really took a good look at myself. A dear friend invited me over and we processed my thoughts and feelings around passionate work and life’s purpose. We sat on her patio in the dark, cold days of February in the Pacific Northwest and talked as the raccoons climbed the tree and watched us. She wrote stuff down, I talked.

Another friend invited me over (or maybe I invited myself over) and I watched her build a set of drawers out of her own two hands up in her bedroom in her jammies. I talked and she listened. And she asked me questions, like she always does. I don’t ask questions - I have to remind myself to do that in conversation.

And I realized a few things.

I was having applicant regret because no matter what I was applying for I didn’t want to work for someone else. I didn’t want to “start over” and prove myself and build up a career just so that I could beg again for time off, tell people how much I was working and when I was doing that work; I didn’t want to have to meet a whole new group of people and talk about people’s cats and kids and goals. I just wanted to do the work I wanted to do, do it well, pay my bills and be in charge of my day, every day.

I read a book around the time I moved up to the Pacific Northwest from Hawaii called “Not Just A Living” - I guess after some Googling the title is technically “Not Just a Living: The Complete Guide to Creating a Business that Gives You a Life” by Mark Henricks. The book was a typically self-help style of book that I generally ignore but it stuck with me in that I resonated with the overall concept: I want the freedom to do what I want to do with my life.

Life is short. There is a buddhist saying that says the trouble is you think you have time. When my mom was diagnosed with cancer and died far sooner than any of us expected, my entire life with her flashed in front of me and in that moment it felt like in my thirty-nine years alive, I had only spent a year with her. Of course that wasn’t true - my mom and I had spent a lot of time together: from childhood moments, learning to color and scraping my knee, riding my bike and taking nighttime walks together - to teenage years learning to distance myself and ignoring her advice - to my later years getting to know her as an adult… all of that felt like a year, maybe less. We only realize how short life is until it’s gone.

And so… the more I thought about making some big shift, the more I wanted to do it my way. I’ve always wanted to work for myself (again) and do it right - to align what I think and what I feel and what I do into one. Because life is short and I didn’t want to not wake up one day having just given 40 hours of the last week to Clackamas Fire, as admirable as that might be. I didn’t want to be working at Clackamas Fire or at OHSU in a role that, yes, I could probably do well, but finding myself yet again yearning for everything I really wanted to do just how I wanted to do it - and not doing it. I wanted to create a life that would someday give me the freedom to travel, see my daughter wherever she was living, visit my aging father, my sister, my friends.

I’ve spent half a century on this planet and some people say I’ve travelled a lot and lived in a lot of places but I still think of all the places I haven’t seen and oceans I haven’t swam in.

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My previous attempts at entrepreneurship were aligned with things I could do but not with things aligned to my heart and that was the difference. And I need to give props to the places I’ve worked and all the people I have met because they’ve all helped me see my strengths and where my skills truly lie.

My three month long job search ended with me redefining how I envisioned working for myself. In the end, I called the Oregon Secretary of State and asked if I could reinstate my old business LLC from twelve years ago because it had a cool name and I regretted closing it. When the clerk said that would be no problem and walked me through a few simple steps, I hung up and felt the most elated, the most clear that I had felt in years.

I knew then that I was right.

I could get a job with a salary and keep going as I had been but I would only feel marginally better about myself - I would feel that I had completed school and gotten a job “in my field” - and then what?

I chose to follow my heart instead. I chose to open a business with no clients, no capital, but it felt right. And I asked to stay at my current job, since I could be useful and they could pay me for my usefulness. So I was job crafting. I was carving out how to survive and do what I needed to do but to redirect my goal towards the direction of my heart.

My dad came to visit and I told him how I was piecing together all this things to hopefully someday find the freedom I wanted. He said that sounded great. And he elaborated: “I remember when you were twenty-something and just out of college and you met that bookkeeper who lived out in Marin. She had this little house and some cats and you just loved how she worked from home and had this business working for people. She had so much work that she had you over to help. I remember how much you wanted that.”

I guess it’s genetic.