the journey

I confess...I'm feeling reflective lately.

The following paragraph is from a Thank You email that I sent following on phone interview. I had parts that were a bit more specific, but this paragraph was rattling inside my head last night and I think it expresses a lot about where I am:

At the risk of committing a few interviewing faux pas (the recruiter in me knows not to talk about age or anything remotely religious), I'll share a bit more. I have never been a religious person but I have a clear memory of my AP English teacher telling us to always watch out for 33 year olds. Per her discussion, it is considered the age at which Jesus died and authors often use it to signify characters at a crucial changing point or ready for rebirth of some sort. I turn 33 on December 13. By any measure, my 32nd year was a rough one. It has, however, led me to reflect and take stock of who I am and what I want my life to be. I have had the job with the big paycheck and the fancy office and it didn't satisfy me. I have had a job that was "just a job" and I still worked hard and found things in it to nourish me, but I felt empty. I want to look back and say that 33 is when I found where I belonged.

I'm not one for resolutions or bucket lists. I get nervous even with enumerated goals (of a personal nature, I like enumerated goals in my work world...actually, I really really like enumerated goals in a professional context, especially ones I can measure and check off of a list). But I do have things rattling in my head that I want to strive towards. I want to feel good about what I do...ideally this comes from work given the time we spend there, but I can find it someplace else too. I don't have anything more specific about what that means -- (I felt like I needed a change from the dots there) finding it will be part of the journey.

In another vein, I also want to try to get published. I submitted an essay to a Glamour contest about my eating battles. At this point, I'm pretty sure I didn't win. I actually wasn't enamoured with the piece...it was important to me and personal but I'd had to work to reach the minimum word count and that made it much less "me" (I like to be succinct). Being a lawyer, I recall that entering the contest meant signing over the copyright on the essay but I think I can fairly take it back to the pre-adding-words-for-words-wake stage and try some other places. I don't have a story to fill out a novel and I don't think a book of my ramblings would find enough of a market, but I will try to send out some essays. And take pleasure in just the trying, even if it never goes further.

These aren't resolutions. And I don't even want to call them goals. They are steps on my journey...not the only steps rattling around in my head, but I hope they will be part of my evolution.