The Countless Lives I’ve Lived
Musings on moving a lot, climbing the career ladder, and keeping a personal life along the way
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I’m getting married next year. My fiancé and I just celebrated our eight-year anniversary; it’s an exciting celebration of our relationship that has been a long time in the making.
Since we have been together for so long, we’ve changed jobs a lot, lived in three different states together, and generally experienced a lot of life. We’re both creatives who have had a long, bumpy journey to not being the starving artist archetypes. Finding work that is fulfilling and checking those practical boxes of being able to pay the rent every month is no easy task.
I’m looking forward to our big day and planning countless ways to make it special, but the process is also making me very introspective. We recently designed our save-the-dates and sent them out to all our dear friends and family across the world. And yes — literally across the world. We mailed save-the-dates to Canada, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Australia.
We’ve worked so many different jobs. We’ve lived in such dramatically different places and circumstances. In a way, it’s almost like we’ve each lived out little chunks of entirely different lives in these years.
When you start out at the bottom, you don’t ask yourself about what’s a good fit and what isn’t.
“In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.” — Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
A great deal of my job hopping has been because I leaped into jobs for not the best reasons. I took my first noteworthy job outside of college because I was working minimum wage and it paid $15 an hour. That landed me in the situation of ping-ponging between part-time jobs which were an hour apart, and working 40 to 50 hours a week with no benefits.
