Today is the 21st day of January, in the Year of Our Lord MMXVIII. And I sit at my desk, looking at this—

—and reflecting that two months ago today, I was wrapping up time in the office and about to head out for a five-day Thanksgiving Day holiday. I looked forward to it, really; it was my chance to decompress a bit and to amp up my word count on my NaNo novel. All was well with the world. The course was locked; the tiller was firmly set amidships with nothing but calm seas enveloping the horizon.
Much has changed since then. The last two months have been surprisingly eventful—and by eventful I mean in a “I will remember this 30 years from now” kind of way, because this moment serves as an inflection point.
A cluster of storms now thunder in the distance:

• We’ve had significant board departures at Caffeinated Press
• We’ve re-branded and re-launched GLCL as Write616
• Tony and I re-skinned Vice Lounge Online
• I managed to lose, despite the holidays, about 10 pounds
• Murphy d’Cat has been puking quite a bit lately, meaning a vet visit is on the horizon
• My landlord has suggested that he’s about to sell the house where I’ve dwelt for the last seven years
• My department at Priority Health (I’ve been with the corporation for nearly 18 years) is being reorganized, and the role I occupy of departmental manager is being eliminated, although the “what’s next for Jason” question still hasn’t been answered

As you might imagine, it’s been a wee bit complicated lately. Nearly every major aspect of my life—job, hobbies, domicile, pet health—has been put under a degree of stress that they haven’t before, and to boot, it’s all been pretty much simultaneous.
Funny thing, though. In my head, this is freakin’ exciting. (Well, not the Murphy part, of course.)
Allow me to explain this apparent excursion into cognitive dissonance.
Long-time readers of this award-winning, action-packed blog know that I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 12 years thinking through the whole “what do you want to be when you grow up” question. In fact, my boss at PH has recently put that very question to me—which is odd, given that I’m a year older than she—but I’ve finally concluded that I don’t think that the question makes any bloody sense.
People identify themselves by fixed constants: Jobs, careers, family, military service, volunteer work, etc. Their self-conception is a function of their identity as defined by their role in the economy or in society. And that’s fine. So a person might answer the “who do you wanna be?” question by saying something like “a politician” or “a doctor” or “a data analyst.”
I’ve always found that framework to be deeply lacking. People are multidimensional. We do, of course, have jobs, and families, and personal and professional service commitments. But we’re more than the sum of our parts. Because most people develop deep ties to place and people, through jobs and mortgages and marriage and procreation, they’re fundamentally constrained in their ability to pivot. They’re locked. So they accept the chains and they even come to identify with them. I’m not much of a Nietzsche devotee, but the master/slave dynamic he outlines in Genealogy of Morals has its useful real-world applications.
On several occasions over the years I’ve followed a conservative impulse to not-act despite a desire to act, because it was safer to stay in place than to make progress seasoned by a higher risk potential. In particular, I think about the missed opportunity of setting out for a summer-long sabbatical hiking the Pacific Crest Trail eight years ago, although I realize in general that my list of bucket-list goals and the trajectory of my day-to-day life have been deeply out of sync for quite some time. So even though I wouldn’t have chosen that answer, the “who do you want to be?” question turned, by default, into “Humpty Dumpty.” There I sat, on the wall, waiting for the great fall. Waiting. Endless waiting, believing myself to be in charge yet a slave to comfortable inertia.
The wait is over. No matter what happens at Priority Health, for example, a point’s been reached where stasis is no longer an option. I’ve got some irons in the fire; I may well end up better off there than I am today. Or I might leave, opting instead to finally launch that health quality consultancy I’ve been thinking about (and which, my peers across the country have uniformly encouraged me to do). Who knows?
Likewise, six months from now I might still be here on Prospect Avenue. Or I might not be. Maybe I’ll buy the house. Maybe someone else will, and either I’ll continue to rent or I’ll need to relocate.
I’ve got a ton of new accountabilities at Caffeinated Press with our board turnover and with the re-launch efforts at Write616 still going strong. Do I keep going? Do I bail? Do I do something else entirely?
I’m deeply fortunate to have the economic security to weather this storm and a network of friends, family and professional colleagues who’ve been so generous lately with their time and counsel.
Six months from now, things will be very different. I don’t know how they’ll be different, or what different even looks like. But Humpty finally caught the storm winds. Humpty’s toddling off the wall. Humpty won’t get put back together again. But you want to know something?
I don’t think he wants to be.