by Rachelle de Bretagne

Created on: March 18, 2007   Last Updated: April 17, 2007

I used to work in a very pressured job. People's livelihoods depended upon decisions I was paid to make. It was high pressure. I was paid a fortune to sort company problems out, and being a very logical person, I excelled in the work that I did.

What happened little by little was that I found that in fact I had no life outside of my work, and whilst at some stage that was probably alright, what was happening was that this life, this one chance I have to be me, was being eaten away and eroded at the edges by work.

I had no friends, no outside interests. I had a great car though no time to enjoy it. I had a wonderful house, though no one ever visited.

It took a great deal of soul searching to find compromise. In order to achieve what I really wanted to be, I would have to give up everything that spelled my own success, though a financial success is a very shallow one. I would have to give up financial security and take risk.

When I gave up my work in the UK and went abroad to live, I really did think hard about how I would sustain my life in a foreign country doing something that would not eat away my life in a manner that offered me nothing spiritually, nothing satisfying, and indeed no "me" time.

Giving up was hard. Leaving a work environment that gave me stability was even harder, and I had no idea of the hardships that would follow. Within a year of living on savings, putting all I had into renovating a house that lived up to the dream, the time came to decide the kind of work I not only wanted to do, but one that would also not eat so much of me that there was only a shell left.

I started writing short stories. Sitting outside in the garden with a typewriter, before the days of Internet, I found that given the space and time, my imagination was actually beginning to be fertile again. My first story was accepted, and what followed was a success story. Little by little more editors accepted what I did, and paid me well for it.

Moving from a job that ate who I was away to the bare bones was a hard move. It was a risk. I sometimes go hungry. I sometimes go without the things that others take for granted, though compare these things and ask yourself who is the richest. I wash my own dishes. Is that so hard ? Do we need the trappings of dishwashers ? I plant the garden. I don't have money to pay someone, but learn on my own, and instead of seeing someone else's work in my garden, see those things that I created from a patch of earth.

I watch the sunset instead of watching the clock and thinking about tomorrow's work. I am richer by far than any company could ever have made me. I was once asked about why I would give up such lucrative work, and I think my feelings on the matter sum it up.

I have one life. There is not one company in the whole wide world that can pay me enough for my life. I took the reins, and now have a life I would never have had in a career.

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