College football season kicks off into full swing today. Our day consists of friends coming over for classic tailgating food, beverages, water volleyball, and a few games. I need to be cleaning off the back porch and the kitchen counters. Instead, I sit unproductively on my newly remodeled back porch. While much cooler than the worst days of August, the heat persists, and sweat drips down my back.
Potatoe and Winter are lounged down at my feet as close as they can be without touching me or one another. I think they share my anticipation of cool fall weather. Potatoe will be excited when he realizes he has his own party guests this afternoon, including his bestie Sadie. Sadie is a mini-Ausie and the two adore one another.
I need to get my day started, but I want just a minute to do something besides work and chores. At the moment, the things in my life that make me unhappy overshadow the many things in my life that make me incredibly happy. My life is more than half over. What do I want in the second half of my life?
The answer is that I want to accomplish the things that I set out to do in my career. I want to work hard, and I want my hard work to pay off. I want to be promoted, and I want to truly be in a leadership position. I want all of the things that I mistakenly made the decision to walk away from five years ago.
Why did I walk away? Two words: Chris died. It is easy to regret a decision when the drivers of the decision no longer occupy one’s thoughts each day. I went home to say good-bye to my friend, my confidant, and my fellow writer. I found I drifted so far from where I came from and where I planned to go in life.
I remember my first conversation with Chris on his first day of school in little Marion, TX. The green-eyed, soon to be heartbreaker managed to disrupt class on his very first day. I laugh thinking back to the outrage that a Mexican boy wearing a Metallica t-shirt created. He truly loved music. He listened to music that I had never heard of. They said it was Satan’s tongue. Never would I have thought that I would one day sit in a church while Guns ‘n’ Roses played at Chris’ memorial service.
It turns out that green-eyed Satan child had a Christian soul that ran deeper than one could ever imagine. Our Christian faith was one of the few things that Chris and I had in common when he passed away. The second major commonality is neither one of us had yet to write a book. Neither of us had accomplished what we set out to do in our lives. Chris battled a painful terminal illness for more than a decade, what was my excuse?
I left a sure path forward, and I went to work for a small firm. I planned to refocus my life on my kids and find time to write a book. Instead, I went from one 70 hour a week job to another. The difference now is the lack of a clear path to advance my career. The regret is real. I gave up an incredible opportunity, and I completely failed to have what I made the sacrifice for, which was work-life balance. The regret weighs on me everyday, especially as Little Chirp starts to weigh his options for college. If I were where I easily could have been as a partner at a consulting firm, Little Chirp could go anywhere he wanted.
As a family, we all agreed that giving up our beautiful home, sport cars, and Ivy League college opportunities would be worth it, if it meant that I was happy with work and not working seven days a week and that I could retire and live a simple life in as little as five years. We gave it all up, and the end result is I still worked nearly every day for the last five years, and I am nowhere close to retirements. I deeply regret the decisions, and I am unhappy.
What I realize now is that Chris and I had a connection, an unbreakable bond. I learned from our friendship, and I learned from his passing away after just 41 short years of life. Chris harshly criticized my corporate career ambitions. We had plans to live in a little house, in a small town and write books. Chris wondered about the girl that I became when I left in my early twenties to go to college. I left to study English and write books, and two years later I was living in Houston and working as a computer programmer.
I also learned a great deal about myself in the last five years. I love to work. When I was programming, my brain felt that same sense of pleasure that I feel when I am writing. I found that there is a programming zone just a writer zone. I also found that my writing skills differentiated me from my fellow techies, and I became a consultant. My brain feels that same sense of pleasure when I sit down to write a response for proposal (RFP).
Somehow along the way, I became a people person. I like my time to myself in the morning, but by the time my 9 AM check-in call at work starts, I am ready to chat with coworkers. Writers do not have coworkers or water cooler chats. They have a life of solicitude. A life that I once thought that I wanted. A life so very different from that of an executive.
The long days and the hours are not the problem. The source of my regret and unhappiness is the lack of reward for the long hours and hard work. One bad decision led to where I am now, but that decision did not end my career. While not a resume builder, I learned more in the last five years, and further developed my skills more than I would have in a more structure Big 4 consulting environment. The obstacle is translating that in a way that opens doors instead of closes them.
I want to go to the next level. I am 46 years old, and I finally know with complete certainty what I want to be when I grow up. I am the reason that I came as far as I did, and I am the reason that I took a wrong turn five years ago. Now, it is time to put a plan together to make it happen.
Ironically, the first thing that I plan to do is to take the weekend off. Friends and college football today, and my back porch and fur kids tomorrow. Come Monday, I will begin thinking about my path forward.