How do I feel about starting a new career?

Dear LORD:

Please help me find a less stressful way to make a living. Amen!

Dearest Ruth:

Your MEQ today was being willing to defer to me in the area of our children. I need to be the parent / head of the family as badly as you need for me to do that. You are meeting my need in that area of my life beautifully!

I desperately want to find a way to make a living that is less stressful and demanding on my time. The EMC job is killing me. I am getting sicker and sicker the longer I am there.

Admittedly, I have a great level of freedom during the non-crunch time. But the crunch time is very tough. This will last until after OOW. That seems like forever to me right now. After that, things will get better.

I guess part of the problem is that things all came down on me at the same time. I feel funny leaving you holding the bag on packing up our home this last 2 days. I really want to be here with you. I will be here as much as possible tomorrow. I need to accomplish 3 things: 1. file my expense reports; 2. Finish the CLARiiON resiliency testing; 3. Buy my offshore team some gifts to reward them for their incredible level of output over the past few months. Once I take care of that, I will get here as soon as possible.

How I feel about my career choice at this point is complex. I am tired. I am a bit stressed out. I am kind of desperate. When I consider leaving IT and doing something simpler and easier, I feel these feelings subside a bit. I feel relief. I feel peaceful. I feel relaxed.

My strongest feeling is relief. It is a 10, especially if I can fully imagine being out of IT and on to a new less stressful occupation. Kind of like the Rolaids commercial: How do you spell Rolaids? R-E-L-I-E-F.

The best example I can think of to describe this feeling is like taking a really good dump. That's a gross and crude example, but very descriptive and accurate. You feel the need to go. You go. Relief, pure and simple. Very nice!

I don't yet understand or know fully what form this new occupation will take. I want to do that. I need to spend some time figuring this out. I am addicted to my job right now, in that it is giving us a way to live, and that requires so much of my time. Once I am out of crunch mode, I am going to spend a lot of time making a concerted effort to figure out another way to earn a living.

I am also going to continue to pray earnestly, long and hard for a solution to this issue. I want this more than you know. I have become very tired and unhappy at EMC. It is grinding me down, and that is not good at all.

Please continue to pray for me in this area. I desperately need and want your prayers for this. You are more important to me in that area than you can possibly imagine.

I love the process of dialoging with you, and I think it is really cool how we are doing this now. I like to read our dialogs later and digest them. Plus, we will have a permanent record of this for a long time to come! And other couples can read our dialogs (assuming we tell them how to do so) and benefit from our experience. Exciting, don't you think?

Love,
Me