The winds of change

How many times have you been in a situation and knew that something had to change?  Maybe it was a romantic relationship or your job.  Maybe it was setting a new goal for yourself or a complete life overhaul.  I am going through a period like that right now.

The last several weeks I have felt an overwhelming pull in my heart that something needs to change in my life.  The problem is that I don’t know where the change is needed or what needs to change.

Is it my job?  I have been feeling very burned out lately.  I love my job and the people that I work with, but I feel like I am just going through the motions.  I no longer have the same excitement or enthusiasm that I had the first time I opened a microphone years and years ago.

Is it my personal life that needs to change?  I have friends, a few of them I consider to be very close.  But sometimes a girl needs more than just a friend.  My heart is lonely.  I’ve always prided myself on m independence and my comfort with who I am.  But even the independent girl who is comfortable with herself needs someone else.  I feel incomplete.

Maybe it’s a need to change or improve myself.  The thought has popped into my head a few times recently about going back to school.  After high school I spent a few semesters attending a community college, but I wasn’t going for me.  I was going because that was what was expected of me at the time.  I was taking classes toward a major that I not only had no interest in, but flat out hated.  I had my own dream, but I let other people talk me out of it.  I eventually dropped out an started working fulltime at a dead end job.

A few years later I finally started chasing my dream and enrolled in broadcasting school.  My grandmother paid my tuition.  She was happy to see me going after something I had wanted for so long.  She passed away two years I moved to Kentucky from St. Louis.

Maybe that’s why I feel guilty for even considering a career change.  My grandmother put such faith in me and was so proud when I got my first job in radio.  She pushed and encouraged.  She was my cheerleader while I was attending broadcasting school.  All the while she was in what would be a losing battle against lung cancer.  If I let go of the career I wanted for so long and achieved because of her I feel like I will be letting her down.

But the dream I wanted when I was fourteen years old and found when I was twenty-four may not be the dream I want anymore at thirty-seven years old.  Is it alright to admit that?

What do I do now?  Where do I go from here?  I have no other skills.  I’ve never wanted or even considered another career.

The need for change is pulling at me.  It’s swirling around me the way wild spring winds spin a weathervane.  But in what direction are those winds trying to point me?  And will I find that new direction before burnout drives me crazy?  I am searching not for something that is lost, but instead for someone who is lost.  I have lost sight of who I am and I don’t know how to begin to find me again.

I’ve heard people say that “change is in the air,” but I have never felt it as strongly as I do right now.  The winds of change are blowing, but in what direction are they leading me?

Until next time . . .