I think I was thirteen here? I didn’t know what a bar was, really, but I knew I could play piano in one and make money.

When I was young I thought, like most people, that when you became an adult, you got a job and that was the job that you did for the rest of your life. I mean, what’s the one thing you ask a little kid that you’re trying to get to know? What are you going to be when you grow up? (The fact that our jobs shouldn’t define us as much as they do is a topic for another time.)

My job picks ran the gamut. When I was very young I hoped to be a horse or a dragon when I grew up. Once I learned that species swaps were off the table, I shelved my disappointment and moved on. They morphed over time; a jockey, a horse trainer, a writer, an artist, a piano player in a bar (hey Billy Joel did it for a while), an actor, a DJ, etc. I should point out, that I picked one thing at a time because those were the rules as I understood them. I have never done one thing at a time.

I’ve never wanted to do just one thing at a time.

Being a DJ was fun and I made awesome friends.

In college, I double majored in Theatre and Mass Communication and got both degrees. (I was one credit away from a minor in Latin, but I was ready to be done with school.) While in college, I was constantly in a play and I also worked at the college radio station. The radio station paid and I also had a paying job in the scene shop. When I studied abroad in England, I was one of the few students who did ‘combined honors’ which is their equivalent of double majoring. (And it’s really difficult to do over there, the system is set up differently.) I did Theatre and History.

My first decade in the workforce was split between office support day jobs and theatre at night. Now, office work wasn’t my passion, but I had a few cool jobs. I worked in the sales department of a large magazine chain (the Meredith Corporation, no I’m not kidding, the jokes were endless and unoriginal). I tried to do the ‘actory job’ thing and did a six month stint as a barista at Starbucks by day and a bartender at a French restaurant by night. This is when I learned that I am not cut out for that type of customer service. I went back to the office jobs and was a professional temp for a while, which I actually really enjoyed. Then I had a horrible job in the accounting department of a consulting firm for about five years. The pay was probably the best I’ve ever had. Outstanding benefits and lots of vacation time. I was absolutely miserable.

There were those two years I got to fight in Paris.

It was around that time that I started martial arts. Part of going for your black belt at that particular school was teaching, which I did not want to do, but was dragged in front of the class kicking and screaming. It turned out that I really enjoyed it and had a knack for it. When the consulting firm was bought, I got laid off with severance. This is when I made the switch to full time fitness professional as a day job, still acting on the side. I like to think about this as my next decade as I made my living in fitness for over ten years.

Before we left Chicago, I began to get burned out on acting. At some point, it was taking more than it was giving and I wasn’t having fun anymore. I took a break from it and started writing again. Now, I had written off and on during the previous few decades for online publications. They were articles about martial arts or traveling for Examiner and CBS Local Chicago, but they were more hobbies at the time and I did them very intermittently. This blog was my first serious return to writing regularly. Then one winter I went through a severe weather depression, lost several classes at one gym that I taught at and wasn’t feeling like going back to acting. During that time I took college courses online (they were free with Dean’s job at the time) and worked toward an associates degree in Marketing and took a writing class.

Glad I did marathons and half marathons while I could, because it might be a while before my hip is capable of training for one again.

I never got the degree as Dean left that job when we moved and thus classes were no longer free, but I did learn a lot about Marketing. I kept writing. When we moved to Nashville, writing was the one thing I pursued outside of my day job. I found a writers group and went to a writers conference and writing classes (before the pandemic). Once we shut down, when I wasn’t panicking about my income and trying to move my fitness business online, I took online writing classes and met up with my writers group online.

I consider myself in my third decade of ‘adulting’ now. I am still teaching fitness in the mornings and a few personal clients virtually and now work for a publishing company full time. And yes, I do still write every day.

While swapping careers is not without stress, I’m thrilled that I’ve been able to jump around so much.

I went to see an astrologer once (just bear with me, you people rolling your eyes right now, have some whimsy) and she said that I had a lot of Gemini in my chart. This surprised me because I'm a Pisces! Pisces Sun, Pisces Ascending, Scorpio Descending! I do have a Gemini moon and apparently some other Gemini, I don’t remember what they were. But she said that I had both high mind and low mind Gemini, which meant that I wanted to learn all of the things, but that I wouldn’t be content with just learning about them, I wanted to do them all also. She told me that I had to pick two things to do, and only two, because you can’t be good at more than two things at a time. She reiterated that she was only giving me the option of two because of all of the Gemini, most people would be fine with one at a time.

Riding horses in the Caribbean Sea was fun.

It’s actually been some of the most helpful advice I’ve ever received, because I am constantly tempted by new things that I want to do. And I want to be the best at all of the things that I want to do. After her telling me to pick two, I pause and think every time I want to plunge into a new interest. However…

She said nothing about sticking with the same two things for the rest of my life.

Dean once told me that I think about dying a lot. While I don’t really know enough to argue, I don’t believe that I think about death in a morbid way. I feel like I’m aware of my mortality and that I have a limited time to do things here. This sometimes results in internal wars with myself about planning for the future and living in the moment, but I believe for the most part, I’m able to stay pretty balanced. I have read multiple times that when people reach the end of their lives, they regret more the things that they didn’t do than the things they did do.

Who knows? Maybe I will get to be a pirate someday…

I don’t want to regret not doing things. I’m also very frequently scared of trying new things. It does get easier the more you do it, but there is still the ingrained human fear of the unknown. And this is how I get over it. I don’t want to regret not doing it.

I don’t have a ‘bucket list’ per se, although there are things that I’m conscious of wanting to get done before I die. This may surprise those of you who know that I love making lists. But the thing about lists, is that there’s a pressure to cross things off. It becomes about the accomplishment rather than the ‘line item.’ And I want to enjoy those line items.

My backlist is already pretty cool. Looking forward to see how my frontlist shapes up.

Changing careers by the decade