Ever move cross-country to be with the person you loved, with no surety that the relationship would work out? Quit a job you hated without a new one on the horizion? Told a long-time platonic friend that you were in love with them?
Well, this is the thread for you. What was the risk you took, and how did it turn out for you?
Funny you should mention it, as I was just talking about it in the thread about parents paying for their childrens’ education.
Probably the craziest/riskiest thing I ever did was walk out of a bad family situation at age 17 and never return. I literally left my house, on foot, with some quarters in my pocket and very little money in the bank, with no intention whatsoever of returning. I ended up legally emancipating a couple of months later, which is pretty ballsy too I guess. It’s especially ballsy if you know the kind of hyper-cautious person I am. I’m not a risk taker. I was like a straight-A student golden-child responsible devout Christian Goody Two Shoes, the last person on the planet you would ever expect to defy your parents, and I threw my hands up, screamed ‘‘Fuck this shit, I’m so out of here!’’ and that was that.
It was an incredibly difficult year, both pragmatically, because I had to get a full time job as a high school student, and emotionally, because a lot of crazy family drama went down. There were times I couldn’t actually believe I’d done it. I’d just stand there behind the counter of the local steak joint pinching myself. I really did this? For real? I mean, I’d fantasized about it for years, but I finally did it.
And when the gavel fell and the court legally granted my emancipation? Also totally trippy. George Michael’s '‘Freedom ‘90’’ was on the radio and I don’t think you could have picked a better song to express how I felt that day.
I still think it’s weird that I did it, in retrospect. There were some pretty dire consequences - it was a kind of a trauma and I held onto a lot of bitterness for a long time about what I went through that year. Those were seriously dark times, man.
But I don’t regret it. Like, I don’t know that I would be where I am today if I hadn’t done it. I ended up being amazed at the kind of work I could do and the kind of shit I could take without falling apart, it gave me a sense of faith in myself that ultimately ended up helping me deal with everything that made me leave in the first place.
Because the other piece to this is that I didn’t fall apart. I kept my straight-As and earned a full-ride scholarship to my dream university. No matter what a piece of shit I might feel like in any given moment, I can always look back on that and say, ‘‘Damn, look what I did. Guess I can take care of myself after all.’’ I don’t think I would have taken half the risks I have if it weren’t for the experience of knowing that when the shit hits the fan, I’ve got my own back.
Does that make any sense?
olives, have I told you lately that I love you?
Right back atcha, kiddo. Thinking happy thoughts for you and Lumpy.
I lived most of my life in San Jose. I had a pretty good job as a restaurant manager for a number of years, making on average about $50K a year. But, the problem with San Jose is that the cost of living is so ridiculous that $50K there is about the equivalent of making $30K elsewhere. That, combined with the fact that there wasn’t really any potential for advancement in my job, led me to leave California for Oregon five and a half years ago, with nothing more than a vague plan to find another job running a restaurant and go from there.
About three months after I got here, my years of alcoholism caught up with me, landing me in the hospital. I sobered up, and have remained sober since. I then decided to go back to school, and I finally earned my Bachelor’s last year, twenty years after graduating high school.
Now I’m unemployed and barely scraping by, and my shiny degree hasn’t done shit to help me get a job, but I don’t regret the way my life has gone these past few years.
I called a moving van, paid cash for plane tickets, packed a duffle bag and loaded myself and my three babies onto a plane leaving the state and my drug addict husband for good.
Smartest move I ever made.
After I graduated University, I packed up my two kids and moved to Jackson for my first career job. I didn’t divorce my abusive husband until about a year later, but it was the beginning of the end of that mess.
In 2004, we packed up, quit our jobs, I emptied my 401k and we moved from central Ohio to Los Angeles. We moved into an apartment sight unseen, knew essentially no one in the area and didn’t have jobs lined up.
Now in 2010, we both are working on solid careers, own a home and have built a pretty good life for ourselves.
Was it insane? Yes. Did it work out? Hell yes.
Oh I forgot to mention, we moved out here not eve knowing anything about the area of LA we were moving to. We were really lucky that we ended up in Sherman Oaks.
Packed up all our shit quickly, put in our notice at our jobs and moved out of shithole Utah to Oregon to get away from an insane stalker/family drama. Up until a week before our scheduled move we had no jobs lined up and no place to live with two kids under 5. We got the calls that we had a place to live and jobs lined up with 6 days until moving day.
Much in the same vein as what olivesmarch4th did, I move out. My mum was a hoarder, and was extremely paranoia about wherever we moved to. It’s either the neighbor’s a peeping tom, snoop or there were shady people staying nearby. The average amount of time we spent at each rental flat was 3 months. So imagine moving all the stuff my mum had hoarded, over and over again, with the same packing/unpacking drama and “are you going to throw it away” scenes repeating.
It drove my sister crazy. It drove me crazy too. And all of us have some form of mental illness already before all the moving started.
Someone suggested me to move out, knowing a cheap room I could get to. Things weren’t rosy but at least I survive.
Hmmm… how about sold 90% of everything we owned and bought a one-way ticket from Nevada to Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. That was 8 years ago… I had lost my job and health insurance and needed to move somewhere very cheap where we could get insurance. We lived like kings on $500/mo income.
My mother has no personality or interests of her own. She is one of those women who simply reflect whatever man she is with. When I was 16 that man wa a controlling, verbally abusive asshole. I’m pretty sure it was on the verge of being physical abuse when I got the nerve to talk back and got booted out into the street. I moved in with my cousin above the bar where she worked and finished my last year of high school while working full time at a gas station. Joined the air force at 17 and got the hell out of my small town. I’m fairly sure it saved my life.
Cool!
while I would never want my kids to have to do that, we spoil them-can’t help it, I certainly hope that they will learn what you learned some day!
impressive.
Olives, what you did is exactly what I should have done. Whenever anybody asks me what my greatest regret in life is, my answer is always the same: “I should have run away from home.” You and I were on the same road and you had the balls to take the offramp I never even saw. If I could go back to advise that miserable girl, I would whisper in her ear. “Leave. Get out, get out now. It can only get better.”
Good for you.
Well, nothing as severe as what a lot of people here have done but I did end up quitting a job was in once with nothing lined up because I hated it so much I felt like crying at my desk sometimes. I’d tried a ton of times to get another job but as I hated life so much at the time due to the one I was in I probably looked like a beaten dog in the interviews. Eventually I just said “fuck this, life is too short”, quit and signed up with a temp agency.
I was never out of work longer than a couple of days and have since taken the view that staying in a job you absolutely despise purely out of fear of unemployment is a trap to be avoided, particularly if you don’t have any dependents.
I’m quitting my job, selling my house and everything in it, and moving from Ohio to LA to move in with my boyfriend and go back to school. I’ll be just shy of 40 when I do it. Whee!
When I graduated from college, I packed my stuff into a U-Haul and moved to Seattle, 2000 miles away from the rest of my friends and family, to live with my long-distance Internet boyfriend, who was 12 years older than me.
It worked out pretty great, but at that time it felt like diving off a very high cliff.
(By the way, congrats, jsgoddess! But I’m going to miss having a fellow SE Ohioan on the boards!}
I’ll still be a fellow Appalachian, MsWhatsit, just with a very long commute. 
I scored 2 of 3 on your checklist there.
I had been working for several years at a charitable organization overseas (in Lebanon) when the management changed. Several people I knew and liked retired/resigned/were forced out, but because my salary was being paid from elsewhere, and they really needed their magazine to be published, I ended up staying around. But I didn’t respect the new guy, he didn’t really trust me, and basically I spent two years being miserable; finally I realized that I just needed to be OUT of there, no matter what kind of need there might or might not be for me, and I gave him a nice, long notice, finished up my last issue, and left.
That ultimately worked out, although it took me a couple years and a chunk of my savings to sort myself out, get enough freelance work to be self-sufficient, and finally find another full-time job. Which I held for about 4 months until I quit and left the country because shit had just gotten too crazy there.
On to #2 on the checklist: I moved from Beirut to DC (joking that I was possibly the only person ever to move to DC to get away from politics), and not long after met up with Eva Luna (who I’d known online for a while) for the first time. Sparks flew, visits were exchanged, and a few months later, she was scheduled to fly down in a couple weeks, I had not yet found a job, and I realized that there really wasn’t anything holding me in DC (my job search had not borne fruit). We had talked about shacking up, but it was kind of half-joking.
I looked at the UHaul web site, and realized I had to reserve a truck THAT DAY if I was going to get a reasonable price; I called Eva up, but couldn’t get through, so I swallowed hard, made the reservation, and left her a voice mail offering to cancel the reservation if this was too much too soon for her.
We got married last September, on the second anniversary of our drive up north to move me in with her.