Life...On Whose Terms?
Day 20 of 31: 200 Words-A-Day Challenge
Wow! We’re 20 days in. 11 more to go. Here is another micro-essay, and your prompt is below as well. If you don’t need it, write about whatever … JUST WRITE.
Life . . . On Whose Terms?
This trip to North Carolina was an unexpected one. My family needs me, which is both a nice feeling and a concern at once. I’m glad I can be here to help. I’m also proud of the deliberate, sometimes hard, steps I’ve taken to organize my life and my business in ways that allow flexibility when unexpected life events happen, good and bad.
A chance to spend a few days at the beach? I want to be able to say YES!
The flu knocks me out? I’ll likely be unable to work and need rest.
A last-minute visit from friends who live far away? Please, come!
A family member in the hospital? I’ll be right there.
I’m fully aware many people don’t have this luxury. And make no mistake: I do consider it a luxury and a blessing. But I’ve also worked at making it possible.
I laugh that some people think I must have made a pile of money at my corporate job in order to leave it the way I did. Or that I have a retirement pension. Or inherited money. Or that my husband had a high-paying job.
None of these are true.
Nope. What made this possible was being driven to exhaustion in the corporate world, which made me see that I’d rather be poor with flexibility and quality of life than be reasonably secure (financially), often sick, mentally and emotionally beaten, and forever beholden to ‘the boss,’ the paycheck, and the health insurance. That trade-off became untenable.
So no, I’m not comfortably retired; we’re in no position for me to stop working. It’s been risky. It’s a continuous process of arrangement and rearrangement.
But I’m doing life on my terms.
Your Prompt / Day 20 of 31
What’s happening in your life now that you could shift to doing on your terms rather than what’s expected or dictated by others? What’s one thing you could do this week to reach toward that? Have you already changed something in your life in a way that better suits you, your way of doing things, your temperate, your energy levels, your purposes, your heart?
To share, post what you write into the comments or via Notes. I hope you will. And to comment on others’ shared writing: (1) be kind, (2) don’t critique unless the author explicitly requests it, (3) tell them what in their writing resonated with you, or made you think differently, or was an ‘aha’ for you.
Thanks for joining me in this challenge! Please invite your friends.
We make sacrifices based on our priorities. I stopped working for most of three years to take care of parents. We're still paying for it, but I would not have done differently for anything. I'm so glad you can be there for your family when they need you.
Yes, the tradeoff - it's always about the tradeoff, but I think too we were sold a capitalist lie about how the tradeoff for working like mules for a soulless business, living half-lives of misery, was "worth it" because then one day eventually, maybe, we'd get to retire! What a sham. Took me a long time to break out of that mindset, as you know. An ongoing process...