I’m in school¹ again. 

I’m going back to school because my work, my entire career, for my entire adult life, has been writing things for the Internet. That’s going away, at least as a livable career option. By livable, I mean an option I can live with. 

When I started writing for the Internet, early 2000s, I could find decent paying gigs on Craigslist. A quarter a word wasn’t uncommon. It wasn’t easy — I spent a lot of time searching and researching and answering inane qualifiers and writing samples for zero money. So we’re not talking about a pot of gold at the end of the freelance writing rainbow. But you could gather enough gold thru your efforts to make it worthwhile. 

I wasn’t pleased when SEO became a thing I had to do to keep working. I am less pleased with AI. I have been lucky and somewhat insulated for the last year or two but things change, and I can see the trend. I still have a job with a great team but already the work is shifting in a direction I do not want to go. So, I am not going. I am making a different choice. I am choosing a different direction. I am goosing it up, baby. 

I have started over several times in my life. New places, new communities, new jobs, new scenarios, new perspectives. I feel, at this point, that I have lived a few complete different lifetimes already. That’s kinda cool, even if it’s not always by choice. 

Starting over requires a lot of energy but it also a relief. Every time I start over I establish a new baseline. I get to reset. I get to peruse my space, both exterior and interior, and declutter: Throw out old junk, worn-out habits, misplaced loyalties, dusty grievances, faded beliefs. Starting over, at any scale, always means leaving things behind. You do some grieving, releasing, mud-scraping. You definitely light up the bullshit cabinet (there’s no better time really). Hopefully you also do a lot of self care.

Then you take the next step. And the next. Along the way you decide who you get to be now. 

1. Nursing school. Doing prereqs now and working weekend shift as a patient tech so I can learn hands-on too.