One Hundred Days of Solitude
October 29-February 7.
The span between calculates to exactly 100 days...100 days that I haven't been "officially" working. Which translates to 2400 hours, 144,000 minutes and 8,640,000 seconds, give or take, um, not a damn thing.
One hundred days. I keep repeating this because the scope of this - not to mention the unintentional exactness of this time span - just seems so vast. It's been an interesting time, probably one of the hardest times of my life. My emotions have spanned from excited (I can't wait to try this whole freelancing thing) to worried (what if I *NEVER* figure out what I want to do with my life?) to scared shitless (uh oh, I'm running out of money.) There was a point where I thought I was going to have to take a job - any job - just to get by and pay my rent. My savings - saved for an event just like this - have dwindled, and I can't say that my confidence didn't do so as well.
With all due respect to Gabriel García Márquez, it has been One Hundred Days of Solitude. I found myself pushing people away, avoiding social events (probably also due to my "No Alcohol in January" quest) and basically looking into myself to figure out where to go from here. It was a pretty damn scary time, I'm not going to lie, and while I wouldn't exactly call it a "Third-life crisis" (esp. since I hate that term and think it's over-generalizing different stages in peoples' lives) I will say it was a time of introspection like I'd never had before. I realized that I hadn't been happy at the last few jobs, and while I knew why, I didn't yet have the answer on how to fix it, how to find something that WOULD make me happy. Freelancing wasn't doing it, and though I found myself interviewing for high-paying jobs that I could do with my eyes closed (good jobs for good companies), I didn't think they'd challenge me the way I wanted. Nor did I find a place that I was passionate about, a product that I cared about, people that I genuinely wanted to work with and learn from and, hell, go have a beer with. Until I did.
I start tomorrow as a Marketing Manager at Digg.com, and I've literally been jumping up and down and doing (virtual-only, since I can't do real ones) backflips for the past two days. My soon-to-be manager asked me when I wanted to start, and I basically screamed "THURSDAY!" and alas, so it is. I don't know how how Gabriel García Márquez chose to end HIS book, but in mine, this story just got one hell of a happy ending.
