Why I quit my job and changed my life
"What was I thinking?" This is the question that has been working it's way around my head for months now. It's the same question that people in my life have uttered in disbelief, ever since I decided to put my career on hold to move out to the middle of nowhere to work in one of BC's most popular (and remote) parks.
When I say the middle of nowhere, I really do mean it: the park is 1 1/2 hours drive on the highway from the nearest 'city', followed by an hour drive on the dirt road. At the end of this marathon road trip, you find yourself amongst "it all", if by "it all" you mean miles and miles of thick old growth forest, smack dab in the middle of the Bowron Lake Provincial Park.
Now you, along with my ex-managers, colleagues, friends, and concerned family members, might be asking yourself how I, a 27-year-old marketing copy writer, went from cityscapes to mosquito nets in one very short period of time.
It's simple: I ended up here because I knew that I needed to try something (anything) different to be happy. After years of being the smart girl, making the right decisions, choosing the right path, I had had enough. I had my wake up call when I ended up in the hospital being treated for exhaustion (which felt ridiculous at the time considering I worked in a publishing house and wasn't exactly running marathons in my spare time).
In the past, when faced with my 27 year old version of a midlife crisis, I would have taken up a ridiculous hobby or convinced myself that I really did love yoga, but this time I decided then and there to make my first truly irrational decision and throw my life completely off track: I quit a job that made me miserable and set out to do something completely new.
Well this, this is definitely new: here I find myself, wearing hard toe boots and trying seriously not to show my fear, being instructed by a very nice man on how to precisely cut down my first tree without killing myself. Yes I am truly out of my element but for the first time in my life, I finally realize that sometimes, out of our elements is exactly where we should be