Wanted: Your life path leap of faith stories

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

So we are talking about leaps. Call me *Frog *please.

I graduated as an Industrial Designer at the tender age of 21 and luckily enough landed my first job before graduation. Two years in my little office in a mid-sized manufacturer of medical equipment and hospital furniture got me thoroughly bored. So I quit, with no job offers and a rent to pay. That backfired big time and when money ran out I took a job at the country’s largest fruit grower and exporter… in the shipping department. My qualifications: speaking fluent English and being crazy enough to move to a small town in the middle of nowhere that is the exact copy of Macondo from 100 Years of Solitude. There I met my (now) husband and had the most wonderful, fulfilling time in any job, but that fucking town was boring and we decided to move back to the capital city.

So back I am, I landed myself a cubicle job in the company from hell. I could tell you a couple of horror stories, but suffice it to say that three months later I was sufficiently lucky to find myself a managerial job, and sufficiently pissed with my former employer to just show up late one day, wearing jeans and a t-shirt and basically told them “screw you! I am gone”. That was liberating, and a fitting start to another wonderful career that ended tragically when I accepted a job as Sales Manager in the same company, a high pressure job that I wasn’t really happy about but I had no saying in the decision and had to take. Three years later I was burnt out. No, scratch that. My ashes were been blown by the wind. And after nearly 8 years on that company I took another leap: I became a homemaker.

But there’s a catch. I make more money now than I was making back when I was in corporate hell, do it in my own time, at my own pace, get to chose when to work *and * take care of my baby girl. Plus I am much happier and relaxed, and so is my husband.

Marriage and motherhood were bigger leaps of faith though, but isn’t it the same for everyone? :wink:

22

In 2002 I was working in Atlanta as an internal auditor. I never meant to end up doing that - I don’t have an accounting degree or formal training. I didn’t dislike the company - but I hated the work. I was at the point that I threw up every morning before going in to work - but I couldn’t figure out how to get out. A candid conversation with my boss led to me applying to graduate school.

In August 2002 I moved to Knoxville to start their library science program - what I meant to do when I first finished undergrad before 7 years of life got in the way. I finished the program in May 2004 and shortly after that landed my current job in NE Ohio - another place I didn’t have any relatives or know anyone at all.

I look forward to going to work now. I haven’t had a case of the stress-related ralphs since I admitted that I needed to leave the other company. It’s worked out great for me.

23

Amen. My twenties, gone. My thirties, partially missing… And about 3 months ago I woke up and said, “No. This isn’t it. Not for me.”

I’m working volunteer at a hospital now. Much better than what I was doing. Where it will lead? Who knows. But it’s a better place for me.

24

I recently decided to transfer from the liberal (read: extremely expensive) college several states away to a university a couple hours away from my hometown. The university provides almost the same thing that I’ve been pursuing, but I’ll be standing out like a swollen, painful thumb. There are Mormons everywhere, and I am…well, distinctly not one of the main crowd. Still, here I have to deal with dirty hippies so I guess it’s not going to be all that hard.

25

I have mental issues and the first time I went to college, I couldn’t keep anything together. My parents and therapists were trying to help me but the goals they set for me were always too low. For example, when I mentioned that I loved to travel, they suggested I’d be an airline stewardess. I thought, why can’t I be a pilot? I was too crazy to know that that dream was beyond my reach. I felt like my life was going nowhere, there were too many people in Ohio who let me depend on them and sponge off of them. I lived a nomadic lifestyle and took on various oddjobs which were fun and I liked, but I always kept screwing them up by having a nervous fit and not going in again to work. I was the only person who thought I’d amount to anything.

I met this guy in Columbus that I was madly in love with. He lived out in SoCal and I scraped together/borrowed the money to come out and visit him. I felt a spark of life while I was in California, something I hadn’t felt for a long time. I knew my life was going nowhere in Ohio and figured if I got a second chance, I could do everything right this time.

I packed everything I could fit into 2 suitcases and took off, only telling one of my Ohio friends, the one who drove me to the airport. I didn’t tell even my parents because I knew that they would try and stop me. I had about $300 to my name and a growing list of failures. I had to borrow money at first, I met a new guy and immediately moved in with him and his parents in the projects of LA. I lived with him until I got a job and then I immediately paid him back for all the past rent I owed. I started as a cashier, in 6 months I was part-time management and in less than a year, I was manager.

I’m paying my own way through college while living in the most expensive rental city in the entire US. If you had told me I would be doing this back then I would have believed it, but no one else who knew me then would have. Last month I went back to visit my family and discussed investment options with my grandparents for all the money I’ve saved up. I could tell how they couldn’t believe they were having this conversation with me and how proud they were that I’ve managed to do so much.

When I moved out here, I had bought a one way ticket because I was so convinced that I’d be able to accomplish everything I set out for. I think the key to getting what you want in life is to not allow yourself to give into the doubts of others.

26

i’ll let you know how it works out. i’m in mid-leap right now. part time job… interviewing for a full time one.

27

In 1996, after working for over almost 15 years in quasi-careers, I quit a secure civil servant job, withdrew my retirement and went to community college full-time. I had enough money to last about a year and thereafter remained in school full-time and worked about 30 hours a week at a low stress job.

I transferred to a major university to finish my B.A. (working all the while) and then went straight into graduate school. In grad school I made a living (of sorts) teaching and am now a new college professor and almost 40 years old. I passed up job offers from prestigious universities to teach at a rural college with many “non-traditional” students (working class, re-entry older women, etc).

I grew up working class (teetering on the edge of poor), where the highest aspiration was to get a secure job and hold onto it tightly with both hands – happiness at work never entered the picture. My family and friends were aghast at my “leap of faith” but I have never been more happy or fulfilled as I have been during this journey. Yes, I have student debt of unimaginable amount and don’t have all the toys that most 40-year old adults have, but I’m happy and feel as if I often make a difference in my students’ lives.

You’ll be as old as you are no matter what you’re doing. I say pursue your heart’s compulsions whilst keeping your head about you.

28

Hey, have you been living in my head, or what?

I’m another one in mid-leap. You all know the drill: Went to college. Got a degree in a useless but interesting field. Got a job in a totally unrelated field. Somehow the job snowballed into a lucrative but unsatisfying career.

Woke up. I don’t know if I like my job - the honest truth is, I’m not sure how much I like my field of endeavour. It has a lot of potential, but somehow I never managed to work my way into a job doing what I really like (programming) and instead spent year after year doing what I do well (chasing down problems and Making Stuff Work). Most of my days are spent thinking along the lines of, “Sure, I can figure out why your installation of EnterpriseWare isn’t behaving and I can fix it, but I bet we’d all be happier if you just treated the downtime as an opportunity to breathe.” It’s like storm chasing, only with error logs and cranky users instead of tornadoes.

Periodically, I look for a new job in hopes that somehow, it will be different, that somehow it will allow me to enjoy doing something I obviously do well. Rarely have I pursued a new job because it looked like it would be really enjoyable.

I’ve realized that if I were to lose the job I have now, I wouldn’t plan on looking for a new one in the field. I am seriously looking at retraining in an unrelated field. I mean really unrelated. As in, horseshoeing. I like working with my hands and handling horses, but I don’t want to breed or train, and I’ve always been fascinated watching a good shoer work. I’m thinking, horseshoeing would give me lots of horse time and let me do the geeky, hands-on kind of stuff I love (We’re talking about modern farriery here. It’s evolved.). A lot of shoeing is about identifying and addressing problems, so I’d still be doing that. I’d be self-employed. I’d be moving around all day.

Good shoers are in demand anywhere there are horses. I am pretty sure the local shoer will always be more cost-effective than outsourcing to India, Singapore, Antarctica, or the Moon.

My own farrier says he’s never, ever gotten a call at 2AM on a Sunday to tell him that one of his horses ran out of space, blue-screened, or quit with a “Richard Kiel Memorial Abend”.

29

Wife decided she wanted to go to vet school, and ended up deciding on one located on a small tropical island. After she’d left, it turned out the place I was renting was going to be sold, so I took a leap: I quit my fun, uber-geeky high-paying job, packed up everything we owned, and moved out of the country to that same island to be with her.

It turned out the job that it seemed so likely I’d get there wasn’t going to happen.
And apparently if I wasn’t going to be the breadwinner, I was going to be the houseboy, and be treated as such. Frequent comparisons arose between me and “all the other spouses” who were apparently far superior. So we got divorced, and I’m back in the states.

So, that leap was a disaster.

I’m currently contemplating other leaping: Find work with the skills I have, or go back to school? My one saving grace right now is that I have no debt, but school would put and end to that…

30

Well, finished my first class at my latest endeavour. So far, so good.

31

I still have my Jepson Manual from the Botany courses I took as an undergrad. You’re more than welcome to borrow it, in case you can earn any extra credit with knowledge of the flora of California. :smiley:

32

I’ve got three stories, one mine and two of my mother…

Story 1

Back in the late 90’s, my mother worked at a major mult-national firm in charge of their internal help desk office (computer support for employees). She and my step father had been sailing for several years on their sailboat and were asked to accompany another couple who were sailing across the atlantic ocean. It had been one of their dreams to do it, so they said yes.

When my mom asked her boss for the time off (she had several months of vacation time saved up having worked there for a decade and never using all her time each year) he said No. … The office was going to go through a corporate re-orginization and if she wasn’t around, he would not be able to promise that she’d have a job when she returned. (He wasn’t being mean, she got along with him very well and he was just stating the hard corporate facts.)

Her reply was “I’ll just have to take that chance.”

She returned 2 months later, not sure if she still had a job, and had a meeting with her boss’s boss to find out what her status was…

She left that meeting having been put in charge of developing a new national intercompany website and got a 20% raise in the process.

Story 2

Fast forward to 2 years ago when she was laid off by this same company. Instead of going out looking for another job in the same field. (something she could easily have done given that her resume looks like a whos-who of personal computer development in the workplace starting in 1984 with a degree in computer science and working 18 years at that multinational firm, starting when they had only a couple dozen personal computers)

Instead of that, she went back to school to get her Masters… in Psychology. She realised that all of her work with computers was about helping people, not about the machines themselves. She discovered positive psychology which is all about finding the strengths inside people and not about what is wrong with them.

She graduated from Harvard University two months ago with her Masters and currently has her own business doing lifecoaching and is also looking for a position as a counciler.

Story 3

This one isn’t finished yet.

Mrs Stone and I quit our jobs, moved out of the state we’d lived (me for 20 years, her for 9) and left all our friends and family behind. We moved to a place where we hope to build lives that are less stress filled than the ones we left. Where the commute is measured in minutes instead of hours. Where people smile and say hello when you walk down the street. Where houses are affordable.

We did this knowing no one in our new state with only an appartment lined up to move into. No job, no friends, no prospects, no leads.

We’re made a couple of friends but we’re both still looking for jobs. If we find them before we go broke* we’ll have won.

*go broke = have used up all our liquid cash. If we have to tap our ‘down payment for a house’ savings, then we lost.

33

Whoops, got so wrapped up in telling my stories, I forgot to comment about the OP…

honeydewgrrl - I say Go For It.

“financially stable yet stressful and unsatisfying (read sell-out) status-quo” is no way to live a life. It may be surviving life, but it is not living it.

I know I’ve pissed off many people over the years by rejecting their (well meaning) advice and saying that what they have in mind for me might lead to my success, but it wouldn’t lead to my happyness. I may not be rich, but I’m living a life that I like and I’ll take happyness and satisfaction with my career over riches anyday.*

*‘anyday’ does not include those days when I’m day dreaming about what I’d do if I were rich. But those dreams are ‘win the lottery’ rich and not comperable to ‘have a better job’ rich.

34

It was a dreadful day in May of my junior year in high school. Pouring rain, icy cold, miserable. I was on the fast track to sucess. Second in my prep school class, headed for an Ivy League in a year and half, everything going like clockwork. Until my school couldn’t (or wouldn’t) make my schedule work. My parents wouldn’t believe me, so my father went to talk to the dean. When he came to understand that I was telling the truth, we cooly and rationally decided that I was going to leave high school for college. One of the few teachers I trully respected told me that I was ruining my life, that I would never amount to anything. I looked at him and told him that in three weeks, I was leaving high school, in three months I would be sitting in my first organic chemistry class at UMass Lowell, and in three years I would sitting in my robes on the floor at the Tsangus areana, graduting with honors from college. Mighty big words that I didn’t quite believe. I was jumping without looking, but I felt I had to do, and god damn it, I did. I graduated in June, Summa Cum Laude. I refrained myself from rubbing it in his face when I went back to visit my high school.

I’ve made one other one, it seemed less drastic at the time, but might actually affect my life more. It was two days before my graduation, two weeks before I moved to California. I was staying with some friends. My friend Max looked at me and said that he didn’t want any more regrets and that not trying to make a relationship with me would be one. I looked him and said “Forget regret, no day but today” (I am such a drama geek). It was just supposed to be a fling, it wasn’t supposed to get serious. The morning I was leaving for California, I told him I couldn’t break it off, that I wanted to make it work. He sort of looked like a truck hit him. By the time I arrived in California four days later and could finally talk to him again, he told me that he loved me and he would follow me to the end of the earth. We both came into this relationship battered and wounded from our pasts, without any real hope of ever finding love. We were wrong. That night we decided to forget regret and live in the moment was the night my life and his changed forever. In ten days, he’s moving here and we’re starting our life together. He’s coming the last day of summer … with fall comes a new season … it seems rather symbolic.

35

I’m impressed. Good luck to you!