This is it … my last day of working from home.
I’m wrapping things up as best I can, and worrying about some barely started (or unstarted) projects that I haven’t yet gotten to.
I’ll know my schedule better once I put in a week or two at my new homestead. I’m kind of torn between “I need to focus every available resource on learning the new gig” and “I need a side income in case these people go as nuts as the last ones.”
I wrote my Dear John letter to the faraway prince. It hurt my heart to the point that I wondered exactly why, again, am I turning him down?
But I got a nice note from a future (and, also, past) colleague — the same person, actually — welcoming me and reminding me that we’ve got great work to do. And in that, I became OK enough to let the other prince go.
God has a funny way of putting you in the same exact situations, time and again, till you get it right. Back around this time in 2004, I was applying at a very similar company, with a competing offer from a prince I didn’t like all that much. I was rooting for the job I got. And I stayed there for five years. I’m hoping the same situation unfolds here.
But it’s got to be different this time. I mean, it’s the same hour-long commute each way, just in a different state. And I need to learn a lot and prove myself again. Which I am totally OK with. But when we joked at the old job that “we don’t know where we live,” well, that ain’t a joke. We really spent all our waking (and many sleeping) hours at the office — none of us should have been wasting our money on rent for homes we never saw.
My life is different not only since my mom came to live with me, but since I finally started to reconnect with her these past few months. I want to spend time with her. I don’t know how long we have together. I’m not happy to escape like I used to be.
Running away from my life made me a top-notch employee back then; I’m hoping that being a well-rounded employee, with interests outside of work and downtime to stimulate creativity, will make me a good asset this time around.
I think one worry I need to shake is that I don’t have any “extraordinary” left in me. Because I do. My freelance employers (the ones I haven’t grown to hate) are sad to see me go and hopeful that when their budgets expand, they can bring me back. That has to say something, right?
My new life begins Monday. Not just a job — but everything. I’m tossing out the cigarettes and I won’t be taking sugary snacky goodness to my new domain. I’ll be using the stairs and parking far away so that I can get some exercise. I’ll be listening to my self-help CDs along the drive and reconnecting with my inner goddess.
And I’m going to remind this world who, exactly, I was on the path to being before this unprompted-but-certainly-extended break for station identification.
Just you wait…