The Journey Begins...
Doing my best to depart from the frantic pace of my life has been a difficult change for me.  A lifelong pattern of working myself sick, staying so busy I can hardly breathe has been, I think, an effort to show that I’m worthy.  Worthy of who or whom?  That’s a puzzle.  “Years of therapy,” I often tell myself but we won’t even go there. I think for women, in particular, we are busy meeting the needs of so many that there is often little time to consider that somewhere in there we’ve lost ourselves. 

I spent the last two years working so hard that I sometimes don’t remember entire spaces of time.  My business as a real estate appraiser took me nearly 1200 miles a week all over the state of Wyoming.  The days I was home were spent writing up reports, processing orders, training employees, answering nearly 60 calls a day with little time for a ‘life’ of any kind.  The business was successful and profitable.  I was paying bills, whittling away debt and finally able to buy one or two things I needed.  But I was working out of necessity rather than joy.  I’ve never found any satisfaction working in the appraisal field.  It paid the bills.  That’s all it did.

Trying to get a manuscript completed for a book I’m co-authoring was done in a fly-by-night fashion, a chapter here or there all the while reading articles and books about ‘making time to write’ and ‘you should consider it your job’ etc.  Who had that kind of time?

Then the mortgage market crashed and although my business didn’t completely disappear suddenly I had more time on my hands than was comfortable.  There was time to write, time to sit with a cup of tea and enjoy the view in the mornings (feeling guilty the entire half-hour), time to realize that I really was missing having a relationship and that I hadn’t had fun in a very long time.

So I decided to make a change, to find out what I needed to know, to gain enough knowledge to make myself marketable in the field of writing and publishing.  This hails back to a nick name a former boyfriend gave me ‘She-Who-Waits-for-No-One.’  I wasn’t going to wait for it to happen, I needed to make it come to pass myself.  I’ve had tremendous help, support, and love along the way from old friends, new friends, family and people who believe in me for no apparent reason.

Do any of you out there have a similar tale to tell?  How have you reinvented yourselves and what sort of courage did it take to implement that change?

I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

She-Who-Waits-for-No-One