I did something bold last week: I quit the marketing job I’d been toiling at for the last five years.

I’m lying about being bold. The situation there had not been great for a while, and they had recently cut my hours so deeply that I was pretty sure they were going to let me go.

This way, I got to walk out on my own steam, with my dignity intact.

I have no hard feelings. That job came along as my daughter was finishing high school. It was a time in my life when I really needed to do SOMETHING – especially something that provided some extra income while we were paying for college.

I was an independent contractor, so I got to continue working at home and set my own hours. It was the right thing at the right time, and for a few years, it was good for me.

But life has a habit of changing on you. The kid finished college two years ago. I started resenting the time the job was filling, and the stress of trying to please a client that was increasingly less happy with my performance.

And as I stare in the face of my Social Security years, that job was interfering with the things I WANTED to do, which included (in no particular order):

  • Working on my health by going to the gym
  • Pursuing creative endeavors, like this dormant blog
  • Catching up with friends
  • Becoming more politically active
  • Cleaning my house (OK, I’m just joking about WANTING to do that. But I would like a cleaner house, and no one is going to do that around here but me).

So I decided to Marie Kondo my life, by getting rid of the activities that don’t bring me joy. And writing emails and landing pages to sell IT products was an activity that had to go.

My last day on the job was one week ago. I haven’t done any of those things.

I made several reservations with a personal trainer… that I ended up cancelling.

I met a couple of friends for dinner one night last week. And I’ll be seeing some more this weekend. But that’s not really a step-up of my social activities.

I’ve toyed with volunteering for a political campaign. But with so many good 2020 presidential candidates, I can’t commit to just one yet. I’m spending a lot of time on Twitter. I’m spending too much time on Twitter. I really should just avoid Twitter.

I vacuumed yesterday and dusted today, so that’s a start. The end of my job coincided with the start of a long-awaited bathroom renovation, so there’s only so much I can do while the crew is here working.

(Heh. I have a lot of nerve invoking the woman behind KonMari. I’m nothing if not ironic.)

That’s the same excuse I’ve been using for skipping out on the gym. I mean, they need me here to make decisions on how the tile should be arranged and stuff, you know?

So that leaves the creative stuff.

I know a number of OG bloggers who have gingerly brushed off their old sites and are posting again. I don’t know if it’s rekindled the old joy of blogging in the days when you didn’t need to worry about finding the perfect featured photo that would look good on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.

In those days, we just wrote what we were feeling and somehow, we found one another, and left supportive comments, and built a community.

Those days are over.

And yet, I wonder — why not do it anyway?

I own three different websites, all of which were neglected while I was more or less gainfully employed. I have spent a lot of time over the last week diving down a rabbit hole of webmastering stuff: Updating WordPress, and plugins, and trying to understand the Divi theme, and throwing my hands up at writing the way Yoast tells me to write.

I will never succeed at the SEO challenge.

But that’s OK. I’m writing this for ME.

And right now, that’s enough.