How to Change Everything in a Year, more or less

Step One: Separate from your spouse. Get a new apartment, move. Set everything up. Sign your daughter up for junior kindergarten and get her a new daycare. The stress will make you lose a pile of weight, so buy some new clothes while you're at it.

Take your time, I'll wait....

Step Two: Stop scrapbooking, you don't have time. Stop doing crafts, you don't have time. Stop baking, you don't have time. Stop playing computer games, you don't have time. Stop (most of your) reading, you don't have time. Stop commenting on blogs, you don't have time. Stop spending more than thirty minutes with your daughter on weeknights, you don't have time. Stop responding to (most) emails, you don't have time. Stop taking photographs, you don't have time. Keep exercising because otherwise you'll explode, and no one wants to have to clean that mess off the kitchen floor. Keep writing because otherwise you don't know who you are.

Once you get through Step One, this takes no time at all.

Step Three: Realize that you've lost or dropped almost everything that used to give you joy in life. Be unable to move past the issues that led to the divorce. Hold your daughter whenever she has a nightmare that her Daddy came to get her, and then left. Realize that you no longer have the time to even do all of the necessary things. Become more sleep-deprived with every passing week despite having stopped doing almost everything. Wonder how, if or when it is ever going to get any better. Have a mental breakdown.

This, too, is a snap. You can drag it out to as much as a month, but it's also possible to wrap it up in an hour or so if you're dedicated.

Step Four: Attempt stop-gap measures. Buy a dishwasher, sweep less often, let the toys accumulate on the living room floor. Pay all of the bills autmoatically by credit card so that you don't need to worry about forgetting any. Realize this is not helping. Realize that housework is not the enemy.

That, actually, you don't mind the housework, now that the house is small and yours.

That getting rid of it isn't saving your time or your sanity.

Step Four takes a little longer than the last two. You need to wait long enough for that realization to really sink in. Could be a month or two.

Step Five: Finger the culprit: your job.

Be struck with the idea that you are sacrificing all of the important things in your life that give you actual happiness (time with your daughter, time to read, time to be creative, time to keep the apartment clean) to a job that does not engage any part of you, except that its theoretical end-point is sufficiently ethically feel-good. Except that you hardly ever get there, and spend most of your time banging your bloody scalp against a brick wall that's moved half an inch in ten years.

Hate your job.

This can be accomplished in as little as five minutes. I don't care how busy you are, you've got five minutes to find a real bone-deep antipathy towards your current working situation.

Then, call in sick.

Step Six: Question your hatred of your job. Question your belief that anything out there would really be any better for you, that you are capable of enjoying work, period. Forget that you spend most of your free time engaged in unpaid work of one kind or another and enjoying it. Question your desire not to spend fifty hours every week commuting to and performing a job that mostly bores you. Question whether you aren't pretty spoiled and privileged, actually, to be able to even consider such ephemeral questions as job-satisfaction and meaning-of-life. Second-guess yourself by obsessively filling out career questionnaires on the internet. Be shocked when they all tell you that writing and theoretical/abstract pursuits are tied at the top of your interests and abilities. Figure that level of consistency is probably significant. Consider that your current job and all of the related jobs which your current experience qualifies you for allow for neither writing nor theorizing/abstracting, and in fact engage the skills and interests which rank near the bottom of the list. Bang your head on the nearest desk. Make up an excuse for the coworkers who come to find out what the ruckus was all about. (Did I forget to mention it? Fill out the questionnaires at work, of course.)

Done properly, this step will take at least a few days.

Step Seven: Read a half-dozen books on happiness. Feel guilt at their unanimous insistence on the ability of anyone to feel happy in their current circumstances. Contemplate making another upheaval in your life to end up no happier than you are now. Imagine poor Frances trapped in a bare apartment with a bitter mother who gave up a stable, well-paying job because it wasn't fulfilling, faugh. Feel nauseous. Complete the strenths inventory in Authentic Happiness and realize that none of your top five strengths are given any play at work. Recall occasions when you have attempted to use them and found it frustrating and depressing because there were so many roadblocks. Contemplate disemboweling the author when you read his cheery, upbeat message that everyone can redesign their job to make better use of their strengths. Contemplate sending him a sternly-worded letter. Do neither.

This all depends on your reading speed. You can do this in a week, or it might take a few months. Go at your own pace.

Step Eight: Is there any reason you can't do both? Can't you write about theoretical/abstracty things? Don't you already do that plenty on the internet for free? Aren't there people who get paid to write about science and environmental issues and women's issues and psychology and all the other innumerable theoretical/abstract subjects that fill your miserly heart with such joy? Why can't you be one of them?

Sure, you're writing now; but it's not putting any meals on the table and it will be years, if ever, before you have enough time to seriously devote to it that income replacement would be a real option. There is only so much you can do with thirty minutes a day. Marketing, for instance, and querying, and studying markets, and developing new skills, are not going to happen on thirty minutes a day.

Whereas, on the other hand, if you were writing full-time for actual money, if it was freelance or not, you would be developing skills and learning about marketing and mapping the ins and outs of the business all the time as a matter of course.

I just gave you step eight. It'll take no time at all.

Step Nine: Investigate writing schools. Consider the evening option: dismiss it because of the difficulties with childcare, not to mention, you already miss your daughter. Consider the online option: dismiss it because it seems short on instruction and high on discussion. Consider the continuing-ed option: dismiss it because the instructors seem kind of iffy and you're not sure how far such a qualification could carry you. Investigate degree programs. Dither. Digress. Stall. Be anxious. Apply. Start biting your nails again. Procrastinate on the corporate Learning Plan prerogative. Be accepted. Dither some more. Get a stomach ache. Budget. Get a headache. Investigate how many credits you would need to graduate and how long that would take, and what the timing conflicts might be. Feel dizzy. Start telling people. Fight the urge to throw up. Attend the enrolment appoint. Make a deposit. Good god, you're really going to do this.

Question your sanity. Wonder if you really wouldn't be better off just trying to freelance for a while. Tell yourself you can do both, because school has never taken you forty hours a week, so you will have more time to write and will be studying writing at the same time.

Step Nine will take a few weeks, and they will be nauseous, anxious, unpleasant ones to boot. Do not schedule important appointments during this time period.

Step Ten: Understand that, for the first time in your life, as of September you are going to feel very old.

Posted by Andrea at June 2, 2008 10:09 AM under Change Addict , Wordsmithery

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