A friend once said to me “If I ever wake up in the night and dread going to my job the next day I would quit immediately.” His words rang in my ears for years after.

Another friend gave up her good, responsible, pensionable, respectable job in an art gallery to work as an animal keeper. It surprised everyone – it meant a huge pay cut and starting at the bottom rung again, but she did it, and the adventures she has had since!

Both these things stayed with me as I continued to build a career in areas my heart wasn’t in… then one day I just decided – perhaps feeling a bit pie-in-the-sky and dreamy – that I would throw caution to the wind and leave. So I did. Everyone was shocked because it was a permanent, tenured, pensionable, well-paid job and we were bang in the middle of a huge recession. Nobody in their right mind would leave a job voluntarily! And what else was I going to do?

Well, I was going to write. And years later I am still writing and have 3 novels done: 1 completed, the others written and needing edits. I’ve kept up several part-time jobs since to pay the bills because I don’t have an income from writing yet – I am hoping to get a publishing deal soon. But I never went back to full-time, daily 9-5 with all the commuting and pressures that entailed as I found I could no longer do that and write well. I decided that life was not worth living if I spent the vaster part of my days doing something my heart could not connect to.

Life now is much less secure, less “sensible” – yet feels so much more alive.

Somedays I look back and cannot believe how I worked up the courage to walk away from such a secure position. Sometimes – with all the (financial) risks that decision entailed – I think, “What am I doing?”.

Yet that only lasts a minute or two. And I have never regretted leaving. Not once.

Go for it 🙂

Josephine (JR Hughes)

http://www.facebook.com/JRHughesWriter

Even after working at a job I loved for 20 years I decided to leave because I felt I needed a change and I wanted to follow my dreams. Life is too short for you to toil away at a job you don’t enjoy. Follow your dreams and everything will work out for the best 🙂

I’m realizing that I want to find a new line of work. Unfortunately, it’s never as easy as “just take the leap!” I have a mortgage, first of all, and if I sold my house it’d be a short sale and I’d still owe like $50,000. Plus I don’t want to end up unemployed with no money and no health insurance. But I also don’t know what I want to do instead. I don’t want to end up in another office job where I’ll be bored and uninspired. If that were going to happen, I might as well stay where I am.

I have no idea where to start in terms of figuring out what to do instead.

Ideally I’d like to fix up the house and sell it in 2 years or so, and find something new to do that will pay a decent amount and allow me to have healthcare while also being flexible in terms of hours, and where I live.

I’m lucky in that I don’t have kids or a spouse to worry about, though it would actually be a lot easier if there were a second income to buffer me.

Anyway, any advice for how to go about forging a new path?

Thanks!

Thanks Canadian Eagle for finding this post from nearly 10 years ago! Otherwise it wouldn’t have been brought to my attention, so thank you very much. It is interesting how things from such a long time ago are still relevant to this date.