On Your Own Cocker

I sat down this week with that horrible little thought creeping into my head. ‘I’ve done nothing for a few weeks!’

No big push on the blog, no massive business breakthrough, no clever new income stream, no huge list of things ticked off the list. Guilt creeped in immediately.

Two weeks ago I left my job. I don’t have another salary waiting for me. I don’t have a financial plan perfectly mapped out. I don’t have a business making thousands in the background.

What I do have is a realisation that life is too short to be giving everything I have to a company that sees me as a number and not a person. I have a very clear plan of how I want my life to look and being at my computer for 9 hours a day on less than minimum wage is just not in the plan. Is this scary? Yes, but in the same feeling it’s also very liberating. For once in my life at the age of 41 years I am now living life on my terms!

But then that guilt feeling, because surely if you voluntarily walk away from a wage, you should spend every hour replacing it? That was the mindset creeping in this week. Then I actually stopped and looked at what had happened since leaving my job.

I’ve gone back to college.

My husband turned 50 and we spent a full bank holiday weekend celebrating together with family and friends.

We’ve had proper family time together.

We’ve laughed, celebrated, made memories and cherished every second.

So actually I have achieved what I said I was going to start doing more of once my caring role had stopped. I didn’t leave a job that also kept me a prisoner inside my home to become more trapped inside my head and home. I didn’t make a big scary decision so that I could sit at the table and feel guilty. I made a decision to choose me, my life and put my mental health at the top of my priorities and that’s exactly what I have been doing.

I know that life doesn’t become free because I have decided I want more from it. Bills still arrive, food still needs buying, and I would be lying if I said there wasn’t fear involved in walking away from a regular wage without knowing exactly what replaces it. There is fear, sometimes quite a lot of it but unless you face a fear you never know what is on the other side of it, and this is what I am going to find out.

What if I spent the rest of my life waiting for the perfect financial moment to start living differently? Loosing Mum and Dad has taught me something money never could, ‘Time doesn’t wait for anything’.

When you’ve watched people you love die, time starts to look very different. You realise that there isn’t an endless supply of birthdays, there may not be another Christmas, another Sunday dinner, another summer, another conversation, another chance to say ‘maybe next week’. Sometimes that ‘next week’ never comes. Once you truly understand this it becomes difficult to go back to living as though your life is something you can postpone.

This does not mean that I think everyone should quit their jobs and spend every penny they have and hope for the best. I know this path isn’t for everyone but what I am saying is a path of a 9 till 5 career, living for the weekend lifestyle is no longer me and not what I want to see when I look back on my life.

I want to create a life that works for me and my family. I know I need to work hard to make this happen. I know that dreams require work and I know that I need an income, but right now my kids need a mum who is present, mu husband needs a wife who doesn’t crack at every little thing and I need to go through this grief process correctly and build a stronger better future.

For most of my life I have measured a day by how much I got done. How much I earned, how much housework got done, how many people relied on me, how many problems did I solve, how many boxes did I tick before getting into bed. But I never saw how little time I spent smiling, laughing and loving my family. It was very little and grief made me realise this.

Sitting besides my Dad watching life slowly leave him whilst trying so hard to think of the memories we had made, the laughs we had shared, the conversations we had, the biggest question I had was ‘Did he live how he wanted to live? or did he live for us?’ I think he lived for us, he put his passions, his pleasure and his goals away for his wife and three daughters and that is something I feel was my Dads biggest regret in life ‘What if I had taken the chance, bought that land and built that house?’ I don’t want to have regrets when it’s my time.

Loosing Mum and Dad has changed something fundamental in me. I still have things I want to achieve. Actually I probably want more from my life now than I ever did. I just don’t want to get too busy building a life that I forget to live the one I have waited so long to get back.

So right now, I may not have a perfectly planned out financial future. But for the first time in a very long time, I feel like the life I’m building actually belongs to me, and I think that’s worth taking a chance on.