#nervous breakdowns

Ohhh lord, I don’t wanna go, but...I saved my life from a fatal nervous breakdown last year for a reason. 

[a wooden plaque, hung on the support beam of an office cubicle, which reads “As soon as the rush is over, I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.  I worked for it; I owe it to myself; and nobody is going to deprive me of it.”  At the bottom is a note indicating it was made in Lake Gaston, which sits partially in Virginia and partially in North Carolina.]

Twelve years ago, on Memorial Day Weekend, I had my nervous breakdown. As if it wasn’t bad enough, I managed to delude myself into thinking that I could stay home and be a full-time podcaster and make enough money to supplant my lost income. Had I been in a better (read: stable) frame of mind, it’s possible it might have worked. Sadly, I was the furthest thing from stable as you could imagine, and by the time 2010 rolled around, I had managed to scrape enough of myself together to try to get a job. That job didn’t last very long, but in 2011 I managed to get a work at home tech support assignment, and by 2013 I had managed to dig myself out of this hole and get a full-time job at the place I had worked until last Wednesday when I was laid off.

Now, at home again, I find myself wondering if I can do what I wasn’t able to do in 2008? Logic dictates that I do everything I can to find another job. I have a decent amount of time to do so, but the sooner I can do this the better for many things, not the least of which is my wallet. That would certainly be nice, but so would being self-employed and succeeding. The climate is about the same as it was in 2008, and while that’s good for my chances I have a whole lot more to bring to the table than I did back then. I have 4 years of experience in photography and videography in addition to my many years of audio experience. I have this blog. I have a small following on social media that I can work on growing. I have a YouTube channel and a podcast I can leverage. Most of all, I have time. So, what if I double down on what I think are my strengths? Also, what if I could leverage my Linkedin profile to gain attention to these things, and attract an employer?

This may be a win-win situation, and I wonder how many of us find ourselves in this same situation? We’ve found the rug pulled from under us, and we’re thinking it’s time to find something else to do. But what if that something isn’t what we have to do, but what we’re called to do, want to do, love to do?