I have prided myself in staying with a job or career for a length of time. I’m not one to jump from job to job or change careers on a whim. I worked in retail for eight years, as an office administrator in the dental field for fourteen, and in higher education for eleven. So, when I took the leap into teaching, which proved an erroneous choice, only to return to education and fundraising, I thought I’d made the right choice by returning to a familiar path. Possibly, this is the path I was meant all along, or is it? Suddenly, I am faced with a restlessness unknown to me. Where has all of this come from? Why this insatiable need to discover the right path?

Is this restlessness a symptom of mid-life and all those nagging questions that arise when we are faced with the brevity of our lives? Do we truly need to secure the answer to the question—what is my purpose? Yes. At least for me, that answer is yes. I do believe we all have a purpose and are placed upon our paths for a reason, but it is up to each of us to know our path and be content in its geography. Whether our paths lead us to worldly fame, community celebrity, or a profound contentment within our family or circle of friends, to have a purposeful life is deemed the goal. I do not fear death, but what I do fear is drawing my final breath with the thought of not fulfilling my purpose or questioning if my life was enough. Life is a gift and to treat it as such is the catalyst of my purpose.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I didn’t quite understand this sense of purpose. I chalked it up to “what do I want to be when I grow up” and tossed in on a back-burner.  No one has time for purpose when ones only goal is to have fun, be daring, and memorize when and where the two-for-one drink specials are in town. I’m sure I thought my only purpose was to attend as many concerts, have as much fun, and drink as much beer as humanly possible before I turned thirty. If that was my purpose, well I can honestly say I was quite successful.

It wasn’t until I turned 30 that I began to question my path on this earth. Why am I here? What am I supposed to accomplish with this life? Throughout my twenties, I’d rarely written a word let alone a poem or short story. Once a large part of my being, putting pen to paper had all but disappeared except for the stories I created in my mind, counting characters instead of sheep, etching them upon the right hemisphere of my brain until they exploded in word stars above my bed at night. It wasn’t until I began my pursuit of the long-eluded college degree that my writing returned. After my first English class, the graduate teaching assistant asked me if he could use one of my papers as an example of good storytelling, then proceeded to question why I was majoring in health administration. But, it wasn’t until my second and third English professors asked me the same question, followed by “you should be writing.”

One would think that would be enough. To have your passion encouraged and somewhat validated should set you on the path with a vigor and with fire, and it did as I switched my major in the middle of my sophomore year to English. My new career goal became to teach in higher education, but by the time I earned my bachelor’s degree and began the pursuit of my master’s in creative writing, life threw some large and life-changing obstacles in my way. Those hurdles lead to my newfound career in fundraising and eleven experience-gaining and incredible years with Wichita State University. I wasn’t teaching at my alma mater as I had once dreamed, but I was learning, growing, and making my way.

If you’ve been following my mermaid path, you know where it went from there—to secondary education. I’d continued to feel strongly I was meant for the path of teaching, only to discover this was not my purpose. I returned to fundraising and management, but the restlessness did not go away. It intensified, kept me up at night, bore holes in my confidence and left me anxious and feeling as if I’d misplaced something. It was like losing your favorite pen and spending weeks upon weeks sticking your fingers between sofa cushions, turning over laundry bins, and noticing you need to do a better job of vacuuming under the beds while all the time knowing it had to be someplace you were forgetting to look, somewhere right in front of you.

Then, I attended a session as part of college readiness workshop for juniors in high school. I’d been wanting to hear the facilitator speak. The session was “Leading with Purpose” and as part of the session the highly engaging young man brought up a PowerPoint slide with one word on it: Purpose. He asked everyone in the room to close their eyes and think about what their purpose might be and what first comes to mind. I decided to join the students. I closed my eyes and without hesitation, as if spoken aloud—tell and share stories. Tell and share stories. Not teach, not nonprofit fundraising or community engagement, but tell and share stories. Just as I was coming to the realization I’d possibly remembered where I’d last placed my favorite pen, the facilitator had us open our eyes and encouraged a few of the students to share what first came to mind. He forwarded to the next slide: Passion. He had us close our eyes one more time. What is your passion? You can guess what first came to my mind: writing. I had found my favorite pen. It had been where I’d placed it all along, in the drawer of my writing desk for safekeeping.

Now begins another journey, albeit familiar. I’ve accepted a position where I will spend much of my time creating and revising content. I’ll be writing and pushing the right hemisphere of my brain into overdrive, something I’ve not done since my days in graduate school when the writing spilled forth on the page and the stories in my head pulsated and pushed to be born. Plus, I’ve volunteered for a community project gathering the stories and history of an entire neighborhood, which I am hopeful will result in my being able to tell and share a few. We shall see. What I do know is I feel confident, hopeful, and somewhat at peace with myself. I will be telling and sharing stories. I will be writing for a living. The restlessness has subsided.