I think my body is going through another adjustment week with the SAM-e. As mentioned, it’s supposed to take a week or two to kick in, and for the last two weeks the dose has been increasing steadily, so I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me. I kind of like the adjustment weeks. I’m growing fond of them. I get a little sad when my body seems to level out a little and I no longer feel like there is sunshine pouring out of my eyes. But like, real sunshine, all full of intense radiation and stuff, not the hazy white beams of stuff that they show in children’s picture books and scenes of the divine. Anyway, I’m feeling somewhat…intensely energetic…is what I’m saying.
Case in point, yesterday I tackled a whole pile of phone calls and paperwork items that have been sitting around forever. …And may have sent an e-mail to my sister asking for her new mailing address and loosely implying that I would be sending her a mariachi band (she said she already has one, so there’s no point really in sending them if they’d just be extra). Most of the things I took care of related in some way to future career plans (the mariachi band was an anomaly). I think all my psychiatrist’s talk about going back to work got me a little fixated on it (I don’t like not having at least a basic idea of what I’m doing when it comes to important life stuff). Plus, now that I’m getting back some energy some days, there might be little things I could be doing towards that goal provided I knew what that goal was. I think my former work situation is WAY too much stress than it was worth for me unless I manage to make some pretty major life/personality changes. I don’t do well with open-ended. Or, more accurately, I do TOO well with open-ended. Way too well. Especially in combination with creativity. And helping people. I tend to just not stop, really. Combine that with huge difficulties dealing with rejection or criticism, and a lot of people naturally prone to rejecting and criticizing when they’ve had a bad day, and it’s not hard to see where things began to get unbalanced for me. It’s been a tough thing to recognize, because I dearly LOVE the other aspects of my job. Love them. But I don’t think that it’s good for my health right now.
I’m currently on the fence over whether it would be better for me to try working as a high school guidance counselor, or in some other capacity or capacities within the school system. What kind of capacities, I don’t know. I’m not honestly certain what the possibilities are for me in the future, but there’s got so be something. …Or ten somethings, possibly. I’m the kind of person who likes variety. If I cook dinner, guaranteed half of it will be seasoned completely differently than the other half. Just to see. Last Sunday to tell me he loved me, my husband cooked our dinner with four different variations. I was smitten. So if I’m going to make a go of something, it will probably be more than one something. But that could be fun.
I am a perplexing combination of very ambitious and eager to be original, with insecure and uncomfortable with change. This goes about as well as one would expect most of the time. But if ever there was an opportunity to try branching out in a new direction, this would be a good one.
But, on the other side, becoming a guidance counselor is quite stable. And I don’t think I would hate it. I think would really like working with the kids, it’s just the other crud and accompanying politics that are questionable. And whether there is still enough demand involved that I’ll be at risk of burning myself out. But all in all, I may actually end up liking it more than more behind-the-scenes options or something.
Of course, my husband is also in flux about his employment future, because having me drop over ill isn’t enough for us to deal with. 
We do like a challenge.
So of course, being me, I’ve spent the last few weeks pouring over spreadsheets with every financial scenario I can think of. My husband is undecided in his career in a very similar fashion right now, trying to decide whether he should accept an opportunity to do something much more lucrative but less enjoyable, or stay with his current job, or start his own company, so we’ve both been thinking and talking about this quite a bit lately. It looks like in the end, he really would probably be better off taking the more lucrative road and trying to start a business on the side. But of course, an independent business has the potential to either go very well, or very, very badly. And being the very careful people that we are when it comes to things like that, we’d both feel better if we knew that we could live off the minimal interest of whatever we had in the bank once we decide to retire, if we needed to. Nice, warm, cushiony safety net.
But it’s nice to see hard evidence that either way we can likely make it work and have the life we want (or at least an approximation of it), and even still a pretty good one if we decide we want kids. That was reassuring. My mom struggled with money worries my whole life, and we’ve started off with a lot of debt, so I’ve gotten used to thinking we’d be worried about money the whole way. Watching out friends lives progress to houses and kids and frequent travel while we’re still making debt payments made it feel like we’d always be behind like that, I guess. This makes no sense given how hard my husband and I work, the kind of education we have, and the expenses we do and don’t value, but it still hasn’t ever really clicked for me. When we bought our house I was a little shocked on some level. My mom has never owned a house in her life. If all goes well, by the time we’re older we’ll be able to have everything that’s important to us and then some.
The spreadsheets have also told me that if we really do manage to retire just on the yearly interest from our savings, and we happen to live until 130 years old, and don’t end up having kids, some lucky friend’s child or relative is getting one heck of a windfall when we die.
Also that colour-coding is fun.
