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Once upon a time I had an office job.  To get to said job, like thousands of others, I caught public transport.

Each morning would start with me dragging my butt out of bed at 6.30am, stumbling through my dreary morning routine: making myself presentable, packing lunch, feeding the dogs and getting organized before the inevitable panic an hour later when I would realize I had minutes to get out the door and over to the bus stop.  Some mornings I would make it  and others I would see the bus disappearing down the street as I rounded the corner and would have to run the 2 kilometers to the train station. 

The next stage of my morning commute gave me time to get up close and personal with my fellow train travelers.  Being of short stature, this usually meant standing nose to armpit with some other unfortunate who had forgotten/neglected basic hygiene before their dash to the train making it a fun game discovering how many people needed to brush their teeth, cut down on their perfume addiction or learn to use deodorant with results usually spread fairly evenly across the board.

At this point in the journey I would begin constant time checking and mental calculations:  if the train was running vaguely to schedule I could jump off just before it reached the city loop, run down to another station and make the early connection ensuring my arrival at work several minutes before the clock ticked over to 9am. On the few occasions that I managed to actually pull this off, I would burst proudly into the office expecting applause for my huge accomplishment of battling public transport and coming out triumphant but my fellow office workers - dedicated car driving office types - would reward me with nothing but the occasional raised eyebrow and a ‘my aren’t we in a good mood this morning’ type comment.  Otherwise it was a 15 minute wait for the later train that, though the timetable promised to have me at work by 8.59am, never made it by that time. Not once. Sigh.

In the afternoon the anxious catch me if you can game would start all over again.  If I left the office at 5 o'clock on the dot, made all my connections and there were no cancellations or late running trains I could sometimes, possibly, maybe, be home an hour an a half later. It's making me all teary and stressed out just thinking about it.

I stuck at if for 18 months. Some days I just couldn't bear it and drove in, a journey that also took over an hour but at least meant I didn't have to stand under peoples armpits for half of it.  And other days I rode my bike the 30 kilometer round trip (yes, that’s the distance that was causing me so much pain!), but with no shower facilities at the office I spent those days feeling slightly icky and crumpled.  All this for a job that I wasn’t even sure was what I really wanted to be doing.

Sure from the outside it didn’t look too bad: the pay was decent, the hours (not adding in the commute) were what I had learnt to expect, there was promotion potential and it made use of the all the courses and diplomas I had taken over the years.  My bank balance was certainly appreciating it.  But the cost to my sanity was just not proving to be a wise investment.  I'm pretty sure some days I would arrive at work so frazzled that people could see it (my sanity that is) leaking out in pops and sparks from my ears and I would have to spend a good part of my morning trying to sooth the remaining shreds back in place. And the effects were leaking into all other areas of my life.  I was struggling to reassure myself that this was what being a responsible grown up was all about and that it was me that needed the adjustment, that plenty of people would be grateful for what I had and that a long commute was no reason to come home tired, grumpy and depressed with no energy to use for interactions with non-work pursuits.

So I signed up to a bunch of blogs and read self-help type books spurting all this amazing and, to my unsatisfied and trapped feeling mindset, fantasy-like advice of finding your passion, blogging in your spare time, setting goals and planning ahead. I read and read and read sure that one would spell out the magic cure and then one day (possibly one in which a shopping trolly on the train tracks had led to me being 2 hours late to work after getting lost catching the wrong tram while trying to find an alternate route and having to walk an extra few blocks in new work shoes that were giving me blisters), I thought you know what?  Maybe I’m just not a responsible nine to five office work type person. It’s time to put all this advice into practice and see if it works. I'm going back to school, I'm going to finish my degree and I'm going to learn how to do something that doesn't involve all this commuting, train catching crap.  And so I did.

Almost 12 months, several part-time jobs and a lot of study and more researching later...

This morning I when I woke up, I had a beautiful hot shower, got dressed into comfy, casual clothes (no more stupid stockings for this lady), and calmly ate breakfast while catching up on some reading. Then I packed a notebook and pen and wandered down to sit on a park bench along English Bay in Vancouver to do some writing. Later, I will get stuck into some study (I’m completing my degree online), and then I will go exploring in the afternoon this lovely new city I am calling home for now. Can you feel the zen coming through the screen?

Sure some days I wake paralyzed with fear that I have made a huge mistake, am going to go broke and loose the respect and support from the people I love if I don’t hurry up and get everything figured out already, but then I take a few deep breaths and try and remember that, scary as this new path may be at times, the idea of continuing along in the direction I was going is far scarier.  For now, each day is a new challenge, each day is an exercise in self-discipline, positive thinking and baby steps. And each day only involves catching trains if I want to catch trains. Sometimes it helps reassure my decision by watching other people’s sanity popping and fizzing out their ears.