I quit!

In the middle of life. A crisis. Some would call it a midlife crisis. By the purest of definitions it was

that. Someone marching through life, maybe skating, maybe barely sliding by…but getting to some mid-point and maybe expecting something. Anything. Anything more than what they brought with them.

I find myself at that point. The general milestones of career checked off the list. Kind of. The more personal ones, less so but not abhorrently so. It isn’t a matter of “if only…” except, “if only I knew what the point is.” 

I don’t.

Years ago my head went through the back window of a car. There are skid marks where skin clung to pavement and the constant irritating reminder that I was lucky. Lucky to only have 33 stitches. Lucky to have been taken to a hospital- no matter how scary the hospital was. Lucky to not lose my eye.

“You’ll shoot your eye out kid.”

And in the aftermath of that accident I was sick on antiretroviral medications because there was too much uncertainty about where the needles that sewed me up came from. I lost 15 pounds in a month, a patch of hair larger than my hand, and the symmetry of my face that I’d taken for granted.

I vaguely remember a change in perspective on the world. But at 25 my perspective was relatively new so how much change could there have been.

Now, in my 40s, I question my perspective and contemplate crafting a new one. 

The thing no one really tells you about bucking convention is that it pays to be brilliant at something if you take that route. Straying from the well-worn path is amazing when you have vision and purpose. I have frustration and disinterest- not really things you can forge a path with. 

Still, I stand with my toes peeking over the edge of some unknown decision. Some path not yet taken, and keep taunting myself. “Do it. Do it. Do it.” I dare myself. I say it out loud to people so their knowledge of my plans might shame me, inadvertently into making it happen. 

I texted my sister a few weeks ago, “if I leave the country I’ll have to ditch my phone”. “If?!” she responded, “when” she corrected me. And I need that because otherwise the lack of an alternate plan to my current distress falls away as easily as tentative brunch plans. A last minute cancellation with the promise of a reschedule that may never come. 

Fear and laziness are at the core of so many lives that wanted more but didn’t manage to get it. I suffer more from the laziness than the fear – though the fear of retirement and unemployment and returning to exactly this same feeling do persist. But the laziness. 

Just write. Just plan. Just imagine.

It is paralyzing.

Maybe it is fear masquerading as laziness. Fear donning a different face to keep me off balance and uncertain. Whatever it is…today I ignored it. Today I walked into my boss’s office and gave notice of my resignation.

Come January I’ll fold my uncertainty and angst into the battered travel pack I’ve had since 2001. The one that has been with me to every country I’ve visited except Japan. I do not know what this jump into the unknown will offer up…only that the fear that grips me is reason enough to jump.