I Want to Change My Life. Where Do I Start?

Trying stuff out, failing, and trying again

For some reason, my post that went viral last summer has been getting a lot of new comments and shares. (There are now 726 comments and 4,794 likes!)

Two Years Ago I Quit My Life

It might have something to do with the election, about which I am going to remain mum. I think most of us have had our fill for now. I hope that this post will give you a positive distraction and perhaps help you think about the future you’d like to create for yourself.

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One of the things that comes up a lot in the comments on that post and others is the question, Where do I start? It’s overwhelming, I know. Here is what I wrote to a reader last month:

Looking back, I think it was Big Magic and the podcast that helped me begin to take some of the first steps toward change. I listened to every word of advice Liz Gilbert gave and felt like I was right there with all those frustrated artists and writers as she showed them ways to open up their lives, little by little.

Once I got serious about changing my life (after a series of health challenges and deaths in my family), I found other resources that helped me go further. I wrote about them in one of my first posts on Substack. So here are some of those from a post I wrote almost two years ago (December 2022), just a few months after I began my travel adventure.

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Life in the Neutral Zone

To recap, for those of you who are new or may remember: In 2022, I left my tenured position as an English professor, I sold my house in New Orleans and gave away or sold nearly everything I owned (9 boxes are in storage in my mother’s basement in Maryland), and finalized my divorce. Then I took my daughter to college, where she is now thriving in her new life. In September, I hit the road with a one-way ticket to Paris.

For years I contemplated leaving academia and what it would take, especially if I also left my marriage. I knew I wanted to return to Europe. But instead of deciding _____ is where I’m going to live and _____ is what I’m going to do, I decided to travel until I figure those things out, which means living full-on in limbo.

I’ve planted myself squarely in the messy “neutral zone” of transition, as William Bridges calls it in The Way of Transition, a book I read last year and recommend if you’re in your own transition. He writes that in between the old and the new, “nothing feels solid. Everything is up for grabs. Yet for that very reason, it is a time when we sometimes feel that anything is possible. So the in-between time can be a very creative time too.”

Embracing that idea of opportunity and creativity, I’m trying out ways of living and working while I’m on the road, and I try remind myself that this is supposed to be a year of experimentation and exploration. How do I want to live? Where do I want to live? Who do I want in my life? What is most important to my happiness? These are the questions that I have set out to answer.

Joh Gale, The Thinker (Female), 2021, from Artsy

How Life Design Made Me Comfortable with Being in Limbo

A few months before I set out on this journey, I read an incredibly helpful book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dale Evans. I’ve always been a planner and had this deep need to know where I was headed, or at least what I was aiming for. Shifting to an exploration mindset was key. Here is how the authors introduce the book:

Before you can do life design, you need to learn to think like a designer. . . . Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward. What does that mean? It means you are not just going to be dreaming up a lot of fun fantasies that have no relationship to the real world—or the real you. You are going to build things (we call them prototypes), try stuff, and have lots of fun in the process.

What a revelation that was, to think the way designers do when you approach the big questions of what you want to do with your life—which, they point out, can happen any time, not just when you’re 19.

The key is that designers try stuff: they test different possible solutions, see how they work, and then tweak them as necessary. Or they cast them aside if they are not working and try something else. There is no end-point to this, no specific goal. Here is how they explain this approach to life:

Know It’s a Process. We know that life gets messy. Every step forward, it can sometimes seem you are moving two steps back. Mistakes will be made, prototypes thrown away. An important part of the process is letting go—of your first idea and of a good-but-not-great solution. And sometimes amazing designs can emerge from mess. The Slinky was invented this way. Teflon was created this way. Super Glue. Play-Doh. None of these things would exist if a designer somewhere hadn’t screwed up. When you learn to think like a designer you learn to be aware of the process. Life design is a journey; let go of the end goal and focus on the process and see what happens next.

So that is what I’m doing, taking steps forward, making some mistakes, letting go of what isn’t working, and hopefully getting closer to a life that fulfills me. In spite of my mistakes, I’m gaining clarity on what I’d like my life and work to look like.

Mistake #1

In the back of my mind all of these years, while I’ve been studying the writing lives of women, has been the question of how I could become a writer myself. I had no clue how to do that after I graduated from college, so I went to grad school and studied how others did it. Alongside my academic career, I also figured out how to write books that people would read (i.e., nonacademic books), which has been a dream come true.

Nonetheless, I knew I had a long way to go to become a self-sufficient writer. My books earned me enough to live on for a few months, despite the years of my life that I put into them. I wondered if I could write a nonfiction narrative about a woman writer’s life that mattered to me and would earn me enough to live on while I wrote it. What I discovered is that the economics of publishing today make that nearly impossible.

I put a year of research and proposal-writing into a project about the writer Kay Boyle. Her life is endlessly fascinating, but it was hard to convince publishers that it would be a bestseller. That is a high bar to reach. I did receive what is considered a respectable offer, but once taxes and the agent’s cut were taken out, and given the fact that you get only half up front, I was looking at living well below the poverty line for two years of intense labor. And I just didn’t have it in me.

So that was failed experiment #1, sending me back to the drawing board. I still want to tell Kay Boyle’s story, but I’ll need to find a new way to approach it. For now, she is on the backburner.

Kay Boyle, portrait by Man Ray, 1931

Mistake #2

As you may recall, during my first month in Europe, I started a travel blog called “A Journey of One’s Own.” I had grand plans. Not knowing exactly what I was anymore, I thought, I’ll be a travel blogger, despite my misgivings from square one. I thought I could make this something that is meaningful to me and might become a modest source of income someday.

So I took online courses and learned about SEO, cornerstone content, silos, affiliate links . . . blah, blah, blah. I spent a lot of time and money building a website and many more hours creating content for it. But less than two months in, I realized—with great relief—that this is one of those mistakes, a prototype that should be thrown away or simply let go of.

Letting go of something you’ve tried can be frustrating and a little embarrassing. Some experiments can remain private, like writing poetry or rearranging your furniture. Or they can be rather public, like dying your hair or publishing a memoir. I wondered, did I really want to give up on the blog after less than two months? I had just announced it in my newsletter and had been promoting it on social media. Could I just stop doing it? I decided that yes, I could, but also that I didn’t want to pretend that it never happen. I’d explain why, and maybe in that way help someone else let go of something that wasn’t serving them. 

So here I am announcing that my travel blog idea was a flop. And it has nothing to do with audience response or how many or few views it got. (I haven’t actually checked.) It has everything to do, though, with what brings me joy. I reminded myself that the whole purpose of this life transition is to figure out how to live in a way that brings me happiness and fulfillment. And it became clear pretty quickly that the blog was not going to bring me either.

The authors of Designing Your Life encourage us to focus on what is working in our lives in the areas of wellbeing, fulfillment, happiness, and connection. (They call them health, work, play, and love.) I have to admit that a travel blog was scoring low in each category. It became clear that it was taking a lot of time and energy. I had spent a lot of time taking classes, but there was still so much to learn as I developed my site, so I knew that would be ongoing.

Building the site itself was a major investment in time, energy, and money (which can make something hard to give up), but writing each blog was also taking me a really long time, not just the writing but also formatting and adding pictures and links. I was still spending way more time with the technical aspects of it than the actual writing. And I hate all that technical stuff!

What I Really Want

Here’s the main thing I realized: I really just want to write! Travel bloggers are not necessarily writers, I discovered. Many of them even use AI to “write” their posts, which they then edit. I kid you not. Learning that from a podcast episode about how to decrease the amount of time you spend writing your posts was the last straw for me.

Writing a blog post was also infinitely less satisfying that writing a newsletter. What I wanted was to share my personal stories of life on the road mid-transition, and a travel blog wasn’t the best place for that. I wanted to feel like I was connecting with an audience, and a newsletter is a way better place to do that than on a blog.

I also learned from some of you that you wanted to receive my blog posts in your mailbox, not go hunting for them on a website. Duh! I realized that I already had something that was working. Why put all of my energy into something different that wasn’t? So that brings me to my decision to commit to documenting and sharing my journey in this newsletter. Let’s see how it goes!

My new mantra is:

Test, fail, try something new . . .

. . . and hopefully get closer to what works for you (until it doesn’t anymore).

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I hope these musings from my two-year-ago self, in the earlier stages of transition, give you some idea of what it can look like. It’s a process—Life is a process!

I’d love to hear from you, as always, about what resonated with you, what you are thinking, and what may be inspiring you these days. What would you like to try? What experiments would you like to make? How can you think like a designer as you look ahead to the next stage of your life?

See you in the comments!

—Anne

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