“This is the first day of the rest of your life.”  That saying has always annoyed me in some way.   My internal response is usually: Oh, yeah?  What was yesterday?  Ironically, it was also a line from the play Rope’s End, which I just finished performing in a few weeks ago, so I’ve been saying that line every day for weeks.

Of course, when you make a life change or a set a new goal, it is like you are starting over.  Or just beginning.  That moment when you say: This is the “new” me.

I find myself out of work for the first time in twenty-one years.  It was coming for a long time – the decision to outsource my area was announced six months prior to it happening.  And there were rumblings of mass layoffs many months before that.  It feels like I was living with certain doom for a few years.  Still, it was strange when it arrived.

I was lucky.  I had the play to focus on – it opened a week after my last day of work, so there was no time to fret about this new phase of my life: there were lines to still memorize!  So, although I’ve been out of work for a month now, it only feels like a couple of weeks.

Strangely enough, the time seems to be flying by.  I can drop my kids off at school without worrying about what train to catch.  I can go to the gym to work out and watch my son’s volleyball games.  I can pick up my daughter after school.  I can prepare dinner and we can sit down and eat it before rushing off to the evening’s activities.  I could get used to this.

But…

There’s that little thing called income.  I need some of that.

My previous job was something that I fell into to have an income.  I was lucky that I ended up working with people that I liked even though I stopped liking the job itself years ago.  So for the next phase of my life, I want to find some work that I enjoy doing, as well as working with people that I like.

Obviously, getting a lucrative job as a writer (is that an oxymoron?) would be perfect, but I am open to all possibilities.  Just before I left my old job, I bumped into an acquaintance and he asked me what I was going to do next.  I told him: I don’t know – I’m going to reinvent myself.  And I felt strangely calm and confident when I said it out loud.

I don’t have a plan at the moment.  I am open to all possibilities.  This is the first day of the rest of my life.