Reinventing my life

Well, I guess not reinventing my life, more of a reorganization of my life.

If you've been reading this, you can see that I have been working only part time in retail since May.  Which is actually pretty great for my health and sanity.  It lets me work on artistic and creative things, and it lets me get a good amount of sleep, and working retail means I am not sitting on my fat ass.  Well let's face it my flat ass.  I'm up and about.  And I like all of that.  It also gets me out of my house which is good for my emotional stability (if I was just not working I would live in a cave of blankets on my bed and not see other humans while I forced myself into a downward spiral of depression and an upward spiral of weight gain).

All of those are good things and mean that I have a life I am really pretty happy with.  I could list the reasons why my life is not flawless but who's life isn't flawless?  And that just gets petty.

So my life is good.  But it has also precipitated a bit of an identity crisis for me because I haven't been a person without an identity wrapped in my own work since I was in high school, probably before, even at points when I was unemployed but devoted to some thing.

But now I don't really have an identity that I feel comfortable sharing when people ask what do you do.

I don't want to say I'm a part-time manager at a large national home goods retail chain because although I do that and I enjoy, I don't think it reflects what I am.  Okay and maybe because I am a big snob.  And maybe because I am embarrassed to say that to fancy people with fancy jobs who ask me this when I am out with the fiancee who's fancy job let's me work part time.

I'm a quilter is tricky because I am just an amateur at that really.

I'm a stay at home cat mom, but that just makes me sound cuckoo bananas.  Although it sort of is the most true.  I am in planning to become a stay at home mom for whence we have babies in the future.  So I can't just stay home with the cat now.  I don't even really want to.  But I keep the place tidy, I make dinners and stock the fridge and run the show and do volunteer work.  All of which would be acceptable as my life IF I had a baby or two, but I don't so I worry that I sound like a spoiled baby myself (and maybe I am, maybe that is the root of the crisis).

I don't even know exactly what I would want to be.

Well, that's not entirely true.  I would like to be a romance novelist.  I have several bits and pieces of novels, some of which are total crap and others that could be a good novel if I ever finished them.  Before I didn't have time.  Now I do, and if I set down to finishing them and refining them, I think--no I KNOW--I could get them published.  And if I could replace my part time job income with a novelist income (I'm not looking to be Jennifer Weiner or Nora Roberts or Danielle Steele, I am just looking for a few books a year from like Blaze or Harlequin) then I would have my ideal life.  I think (I know, I am so non-specific about this).

So that is the root of the reorganization.  Changing/structuring the life I have today to give me time to/force me to write on the novels, so that someday soon I will have one to submit to publishers so that by the time I quit work to have babies or adopt babies or whatever, novelist income will be sufficient that I never have to go out and get a job again.

The reorg means no more sleeping in for no reason and getting up at a regular time each day.  It means voicing the secret goals so someone somewhere will hold me accountable to them just by checking in on my status.  It means using time to write each week a few days a week for a few hours a week.  Which technically is what I should be doing now.  But I plan to build all these steps in slowly so I work my way up into a habit (like I've done with flossing and my nightly face routine).  I need to learn to walk before I enter a marathon.