A Chance to Try
I have been in a bad place lately, and I just couldn’t bring myself to blog any of it. It all sounded like ‘wah, wah, wah, miserable Dannielle is miserable again’ and I just didn’t want to share the wah fest. My anxiety has been high and I’ve struggled to not let it get on top of me.
Coming home has been much harder than I anticipated. In fact, I don’t really know what I was anticipating but feeling like a square peg trying to fit in a round hole wasn’t it. Then I saw this quote (which I remade here) on Pinterest, that I’ve seen so many times before, but this time I really read it:
And I sat there and thought to myself: YES, maybe I will. So I had a bit of a think about the things I always wanted to do and each time I did, it came back to two related things: interior design and styling. I’ve always been fascinated by interior design, in fact it was what I wanted to be when I grew up (when I was 13 and everyone else wanted to be a marine biologist). But I’ve always been too scared to try.
So yesterday, I put my brave face on and signed up to a proper short course on Interior Design and I start next week! It’s been a while since I felt so excited about something, but in sharing it with people yesterday the response was overwhelmingly positive and it made me just that little bit less nervous and just a little bit more like I’m finding my feet. I’m looking for something that I will be happy working crazy hours at and will be something that can grow with me.
Maybe this is just what I’m looking for, and maybe it isn’t. But I’ll never know until I try and I’m taking the happy ‘this feels right’ feeling and running with it. 27 was always going to be a big year of change for me and one big adventure. So far it’s got lots of twists and turns that I didn’t expect, but change is good for the soul.
I have some exciting ideas that I’m going to work on, and for now I’m feeling great. I’ll take great over miserable any day. Can’t wait to tell you all about this course and how it goes.
xx
A Lost Duck
I’ve been home nearly 3 weeks now, and I don’t really know what to tell you. The days are fine, most of them. They go by quickly. I seem to fill them with things, then it’s time to cook dinner and the sun sets again.
And then the ‘what on earth are you going to do with your life’ sense of impending doom comes back. All that energy and excitement that I felt coming home, that feeling that everything was going to be ok, it dissipated that Wednesday after I came home. Vanished. I got sick and the doubts crept in and set up camp in my head and they come back each evening.
For the first time in my life I’m looking at a future beyond 30. It’s not that I didn’t think I’d make it that far, but 27 always felt like such a huge obstacle to overcome that I never really thought ‘long term’. It probably seems ridiculous for anyone who has been there, done that. But it’s true. So now I’m back home and trying to work out which direction to take to make the next 10 years happy ones (for as much as I can be in control of that). I came home to create a happier, healthier future. That bit I know.
I’m back to running, slowly but surely I will pound that pavement until I feel like I can call myself a runner. I will use that time each morning to get out of my own head and just focus on running up that hill that looks like it’s flat until you’re running up it. I will make goals that are just for me and smile when I reach them and remind myself that there’s always tomorrow when I don’t quite make it.
As for work, well I’m really not sure. I don’t want to be a web designer long term. I got burnt out so badly by the end of last year that I couldn’t stand to look at code anymore, and with the time away from the computer, travelling and seeing people I realised just how bad it is for an introvert to work from home on her own ALL THE TIME. I couldn’t believe how much I loved the interaction with other people at Alt. How much people understood my story more when I told it in person. How good it felt to laugh with people and not just into my computer screen.
I know I need to find something that I love to do, that I’m good at, that gets me out of the house. I still want to run my own business, but I want it to be something that I want to do long term, not just something that will bring in the cash short term. It will be creative, because this is at my core. 20something years of drawing, writing and dreaming tell me that this is key. Whilst I love travel – I love that the memories are all mine. I thought about trying my hand at travel writing, but this trip made me realise it’s the joy I get out of travel that I cherish not the writing, and I worry that making it a job would take that away from me. A very selfish thing, I know.
I’m trying to be zen about all this not knowing and let it come to me organically, in the way it always does when things are meant to be, but the tutting and the (well meaning) asking what I’m doing now, are making me doubt myself. Thankfully I came home with a cash buffer, and I have a bit more time time to get my shit together. Sometimes I feel like I should just get in the car and drive until it comes to me, but then I remember that I’m not on my trip anymore and I don’t have a car. So I run when I can, and remind myself that I’m lucky that I had a home to come back to and time up my sleeve and when all else fails, I turn the music up as loud as I can and I sing my lungs out where no one can hear me missing the notes and sounding ridiculous.
It will all work out eventually, I just know it. Hopefully eventually comes soon. x
Hey Come On Let’s Go
I’m at the stage of this trip planning where I’m itching to get going, but on the flip side I’m also getting sad at the things I’m going to miss while I’m gone.
Some days the enormity of what I’m doing is too much and I just have to pretend it isn’t happening. It seems it’s those days where everyone wants to ask how the plans are going. Murphy’s Law, hey?! And I love that they are interested, but I’m scared that I’ve become a one trick pony. Yes, I talk about it a lot and I’m so excited to share it all with you, but it makes me worry for when it’s over.
But then I think, but will it be ‘over’? Maybe not, maybe it’s the start of something, not a holiday/vacation but a foundation for the next part of my life. That’s what I’ve been working so hard for. I can’t remember if I wrote this to you before, but I changed my way of thinking somewhere around the time I decided to try to make this happen. I decided that I didn’t want to build a career, but to build a happy life. I know as a workaholic, that work will be a big part of that. I’m not a live for the weekend kind of girl.
I decided that I wanted to set the wheels in motion for something bigger than just a job, but to look at the bigger picture and try to find a way that they could all work together. To traditional thinking, this is bloody crazy. But it’s something I want to try, and I figured if there was any year to start putting living back to a priority, 27 would have to be it. Somewhere along the way living only to work and not to do anything else became untenable. I did it for 3 years and that’s 3 years of living that I can’t get back.
There are places to see, and things to write about. There is heartache and joy to be had. But no more sleepwalking. No more being too afraid to do. I don’t want to be that person that let their dreams float away without them. My dreams are big and crazy and stupid and sweet. They’re not all the same as yours, but some might be.
2013 will have lots of laughs, lots of tears and a hell of a lot of unknowns. An adventure it will be.
I worry that I sound like a broken record, but this is what fills my brain right now.
I read this quote the other day and it really stuck with me:
‘She turned her can’ts into cans and her dreams into plans’ – Kobi Yamada
Maybe I’m doing that too?! (Or maybe I’ve gone completely bonkers?!)
What are your dreams for the new year?
x
* Title comes from a song I love called Death Beach Party by Faker
