Ope. There it is.
Four minutes. That's how long it took to lose my job. Challenge accepted!
ALL POSTS
“Due to corporate restructuring, your position has been eliminated…”
I must've zoned out after that.
I have no idea what else she said.
The whole call took less than four minutes.
Another three weeks and they would've been emailing me one of those corporate “Happy Anniversary!” messages.
Twelve years in the industry. Nearly another anniversary with the company. Four minutes.
Funny, the things that stick in your mind.
The ghost of a similar phone call three years ago played through my head.
“Due to market conditions, the company is declaring bankruptcy and shutting its doors effective immediately…”
That call took ten minutes.
I remember that, too.
And yet…
Somehow…
I'm not upset.
I'm…excited?
It's funny.
I feel like someone just ripped off a Band-Aid I'd been too much of a pansy to pull off myself.
And underneath it?
Relief.
Like a weight I hadn't fully realized I was carrying has finally been lifted.
For the first time in a long time, I feel like that high school kid again, standing at the edge of adulthood, believing the whole world is full of possibilities.
I can do something different.
I can be something different.
And perhaps the most liberating realization of all?
I don't have to go back to working in mortgage.
In fact, I'd really rather not.
Don't get me wrong. Mortgage has been good to me in a lot of ways. I made a good living. I was capable at my job. I knew what I was doing.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped doing a lot of the things that made me feel like me.
Thinking. Exploring. Creating.
Living, really.
Not that I wasn't alive, obviously. I was just so busy making a living that I wasn't doing much living.
And the worst part? I didn't even realize how much I'd missed it until I suddenly had the possibility of getting it back.
I'd started down another path once.
I even went so far as to get my master's degree in data analytics.
And then?
Nothing.
I went right back to the career I knew. The one I'd spent twelve years building. The one I increasingly disliked but couldn't quite convince myself to leave.
Because the money was good.
Because I had responsibilities.
Because starting over is terrifying when you've already built a comfortable life.
The golden handcuffs are real, my friend.
But now they're off.
Which is exciting.
And also raises a few rather inconvenient questions.
Who hires someone with a master's degree she's never actually used professionally?
How do you break into a technical field when you're starting over in your late thirties?
How do you convince someone to take a chance on you when you're still trying to figure out what you're capable of?
And, perhaps most importantly…
Where do I even start?
I guess that's what we're going to find out.
Together.
I heard someone speak once — a TED Talk, maybe? — about how ordinary people don't take enough chances. We don't fail enough. We spend so much time avoiding mistakes that we never learn which risks are worth taking.
I wish I could remember who said it.
But the idea stuck.
And I've been thinking about it a lot lately.
I've spent years being responsible. Being practical. Doing the thing I knew how to do because it was safe and it paid the bills.
And somewhere in there, I forgot what it felt like to be curious about what I might become.
So here's the plan.
I'm going to learn.
I'm going to build things.
I'm going to ask stupid questions, make mistakes, chase ideas that might go absolutely nowhere, and probably embarrass myself more than once.
I'm going to document the whole messy process of trying to turn a dusty data analytics degree, a little Python knowledge, and an unreasonable amount of curiosity into an entirely new career.
Maybe it'll work.
Maybe it won't.
Maybe I'll discover something I never even thought to look for.
But for the first time in years, I'm genuinely excited to find out.
I'm going to fail out loud.
Try again.
And fail better.
Because somewhere along the way, I forgot how to live out loud, too.
And I think it's about time I remembered.
Welp. Here we go.
Ready, fire, aim!
