In Case You're Teetering on the Brink of an Unconventional Life Pivot...

Here's a couple beers and a well-deserved kick over the edge.

I swear, creating with Canva gives me life 😁

I’m certainly no stranger to questionable life choices. As a teenager, I didn’t opt for the starter pack in bad decision-making, such as skipping school or shoplifting. I skipped through all the junior mistakes and went straight for the gusto by getting pregnant.

I hung out in circles that were light years away from being good influences. But there were one or two little glimmers of hope within those circles. The normal kids who, like me, were just trying to find our way.

One of those normal kids was Anthony. Although we hung out within the same lousy crowd, we were both pretty good kids. He was a clean-cut, smart, and genuinely nice person. He was also one of the very few young males I knew at the time who wasn’t aspiring toward being a gangster, a pimp, or a thug.

We had 90s rap music to thank for that. NWA anyone?

Anthony was one of the few friends who didn’t judge me when I ended up pregnant at eighteen. In fact, he was such a nice guy that I’d even considered him as my child’s namesake in the event that my baby was a boy.

Eventually, we drifted and went our separate ways. That’s what happens when a teenager is on the road to parenthood and immediately has to change her priorities. I would never again hang out with friends at nightclubs because you no longer fit into the scene (or club clothes) when you’ve ballooned to the size of a log cabin.

Fast forward thirty-ish years and I’d all but forgotten about childhood and teenage friends. I’d just been out there doing this thing called living, parenting, surviving…sometimes hanging by a thread.

During those years, I’d spent fifteen of them strapped to a chair, working in corporate drudgery because it was stable. When my son grew up and flew the coop, along came a few midlife crises followed by a bold and hasty move to the Caribbean. (There’s an epic saga of a story unfolding about that right here).

Upon returning to Canada, I fell headfirst into a work industry I ended up flourishing in and still adore today, even though it’s not a typical late-life choice.

I moved into the restaurant industry and I LOVED it.

Pre-COVID, I had settled into a career overseeing an upscale restaurant in a wealthy, members-only club setting.

Here’s the ‘kick over the edge’ part…

The restaurant occasionally held wine and craft beer-themed dinner events. One evening I showed up to work just as the craft beer representative hosting the dinner was setting up. At the other end of the dining room, all I could see of him was the back of a very tall, black man with long dreadlocks neatly tied behind his head.

I proceeded to round up my staff and begin coaching them on how we would conduct the dinner when the beer rep came around the corner looking for the manager.

That beer rep was Anthony.

I was stunned. He was no longer the kid I once knew, yet he hadn’t aged a day. He was about a foot taller than me, his hair was longer than mine, and he looked like he’d just stepped off a plane from Barbados, all relaxed, laid back, and still beaming the same bright and genuine smile.

The two of us confused the hell out of my staff when we spontaneously jumped into a giant bear hug in front of everyone. We hadn’t seen each other since we were 18 years old, we were now both 46.

That same evening, after the dinner event wrapped up and the restaurant had closed, Anthony and I sat down for a drink together. I was wildly curious about where he’d gone in life. As it turned out he had walked a similar path to mine, minus the parenting part.

He told me that after high school he went on to further his education and landed in the tech industry, earning a six-figure salary for many years. Like me, he eventually burned out on mind-numbing work and made an unconventional pivot late in life.

Hence, the craft beer sales.

It seemed we had both thrown in the towel on typical career-pathing somewhere along the line, in exchange for more relaxing and fulfilling work. He now frequents upscale dining establishments promoting a product people actually like. Beer. And he has a lot of fun doing it.

After he told me about his journey, I felt more validated than I’d felt in a very long time. Other people were making random, offbeat career changes just like I had.

I got into the restaurant industry on the brink of 40 and had always felt like the old goose in a pond of young ducks. All the people I supervised were younger than my child and even though I relate famously with young people, I sometimes wondered how the hell I ended up where I did.

Anthony helped me answer that question in very simple terms.

It boils down to ONE thing: FULFILLMENT.

So, there we were, reuniting as two cronies, restauranting and beer-repping our forty-something asses off.

🍺🍺🍺

In this day and age, conventional career-pathing seems to be moving further and further away from ladder climbing and more towards personal fulfillment, and I wholeheartedly cosign this movement.

A couple of years ago I read a piece called, Where Have All the Fun Jobs Gone? The writer talks about how mundane the act of job prospecting is these days (or ANY day). Especially at a certain stage in life, and especially post-pandemic when we were all given enough downtime to reevaluate WTF this life is for.

We’re simply not interested in work that doesn’t provide personal gratification.

Women in particular often wear many obligatory hats before we get to the stage of seeking out and choosing personal fulfillment. And we’re seeking it for no other reason than WE CAN.

We’ve been daughters, students, employees, wives, mothers, cooks, housekeepers, ATM machines, among an avalanche of other roles we’ve starred in at different stages.

In all the areas of life where we may have felt inadequate at one point or another, choosing who and what we wish to become is now highly doable. Finding our own way isn’t as unconventional as we think it is, and following our wild hearts and gut feelings is an actual thing now more than ever before.

Sometimes, all it takes is running into an old friend who can validate it for us.

So, if you never happen to run into that old friend? Let me be her. Let me tell you to go run that restaurant and eat all the chef-prepared food you want. Go peddle your wine and beer to the fancy places.

Go mow the grass on a golf course just to get free games because that’s actually legit. My mother did it for ten years beginning in her sixties!

And definitely go move to Barbados, Jamaica, or the Bahamas. And then come back looking like you just stepped off a flight from Narnia, recharged and ready to get started on your do-over.

Five stars….I highly recommend it! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

(Are you noticing my pattern of five stars yet?)

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I LOVE hearing other people’s stories of unusual career choices, transitions, and total flukes that worked out in the end.

If you’ve accidentally or on purpose fallen into places you’d never in a million years thought you would, please drop it into the comments. You never know who you might help kick over the edge when they most need it.