My Myers-Briggs personality type assessment score, INFP, puts me in a group with 1% of the population.  No wonder I’ve often felt out of step with most other folks.  Careers most fitting for this personality type are psychology, social science, writing and teaching.  I have an MBA in Finance and spent most of my career years in corporations doing financial analysis and strategic planning.  Yikes!

Being a divorced mother of two young children at the age of 26, I knew that I had to be practical and figure out how to earn a living.  I did.  At that stage of my life it was all about raising and supporting my children.  No time to think about what I might want to do or be.  That was fine.

As the children began to be launched I was able to sit back, take a breath and understand that I didn’t belong in the corporate world.  I simply didn’t get it.  I left a career in finance and began working in a local needlepoint shop.  I loved needlepoint and I loved working with it.  I imagine I have the honor of being the lowest paid MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management in history.

We moved from the suburbs of Chicago to Santa Fe in 1999.  Scary and fabulous.  Sold our house, my husband quit his job at a big consulting firm and we took off.  We met remarkable people, lived in a post card beautiful setting, relished the 320+ days of sunshine and cool, dry mountain air.  Pretty idyllic.  However life evolves and after ten year we made the decision to move back.  Children and grandchildren were factors, but not the compelling ones.  We had a chance to buy the home my parents built in the late ‘60’s.  It has a complicated history, but has been the center of family gatherings for years and it made me sad to think of strangers living in it.

Since I have been back I have spent a fair amount of time writing.  I have a children’s book bubbling around in my head and I’m working on that.  I am reading Natalie Goldberg’s books about her writing path.  Gotta love a Jewish bisexual Zen author grandmother who lives in Taos!

Since writing this last year, my husband and I are in the process of getting divorced.  Guess the move back to my home base didn't translate so well for him.  It's a huge change after 25 years, but we all change over time and I guess we're lucky if both partners zig and zag together.  We didn't.  It's the end of a book - certainly more than a chapter after so many years.

I wonder what's next...

Boy, do you have a journey ahead of you. Be prepared but don’t be scared.  You’ll think you have a road map, but it will get dirty and torn and eventually lost along the way so you’ll have to wing it.  You’ll make the best decisions you can at the time.  Some will be good, some won’t.  It’s OK.  Trust yourself.  You know yourself better than anyone.  Have confidence that even the mistakes that seem disastrous will teach you something.  It might take a while for you to notice that. 

There will be long smooth legs of the journey.  Savor them.  You will meet remarkable people who will have profound effects on you.  Embrace them. You will accomplish great things. Perhaps not in the grand scheme of the universe, but you will plant a beautiful garden or paint a lovely picture or make a sad child smile.  Good for you.

Laugh, dance, hug, read, write,  listen. Ask for help when you need it.  Offer help when you can.

Let me know how it’s going.