A Quick Check-in from Beautiful Maresias, Brazil
Life seems determined to teach me new lessons right now, and I can’t say I’m all that jazzed about it.
We learned on the way here, for example, that you cannot buy a bus ticket online in Brazil without a local tax ID… and you will be denied boarding if your friend puts a ticket for you in their name.
Thankfully, we found we could take an Uber for less than 2x the cost of new bus tickets (which we’d have to repurchase as they forfeited our first ones) and would get to the cozy beach town two hours faster.
So off we went. I think Lucy preferred the Uber, anyway. I know I did.
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We learned there are a lot of ants and mosquitoes here, and that they really like us. I’m still learning difficult lessons about my physical limitations as my body continues to wreak havoc in creative new ways, too.
Perhaps most discouraging is that a treatment I’ve leaned on for over two years seems to have stopped working. It quite literally changed my life… and it’s no longer effective. That treatment was #3 on the list of things to try to combat the issue, and the next stop on the list is surgery. Having to navigate that weighs heavily on my mind.
The biggest and most impactful lesson of late is a (yet another) reminder that we simply cannot have or do it all. And importantly, there are things I’m just not willing to do anymore in that empty pursuit. Sacrificing my peace, health, and happiness for money is top of that list.
And so, I made the difficult decision to end my contract day job. I’m simply too tired and worn down to continue in an environment that takes more than it provides.
Big changes are as terrifying as they are exciting. I’m a planner, and even more impactful than that is that I’m a survivor with a deeply entrenched scarcity mindset. Leaving a job without another lined up seems incredibly stupid, but everything in me has been telling me it’s time for a leap of faith.
I will never achieve the things I’ve been wanting to do with only small scraps of energy left at the end of a full workday for someone else.