Hello, again

Wow. My most recent posts on this blog are from seven months ago. Seven months. I don't know how that much time could have passed, leaving me without a single electronic record (besides angst-written emails to friends and family) of all the hard lessons I have learned along the way. I guess that I was just so caught up in surviving this whirlwind we call life that I had no time to keep records.

No worries. I still remember everything. Or, everything I want to remember. At any rate, I still want to share my stories with whoever reads or passes by this blog and so here's a short recap...

Since last February, I went on a much-needed visit to the US and spent some very precious time with my family and friends. I was also the second-in-command for the implementation of the world's first integrated biometric management system, a contract that I helped implement by schlepping back and forth between government offices doing presentation after presentation to an often-sleeping group of government higher-ups. I also completed the highly confusing K-1 visa petition to allow the love of my life to start a life with me in the US, for which we are still waiting to hear from the seemingly black hole that cashed our $450 check right away and proceeded to give the annoying "processing" message whenever we check in. I also became facebook-officially engaged to the aforementioned love of my life and completed 26 out of 29 days of fasting during the Holy Month of Ramadan to show support for the religion of this country and my fiancé and my family to-be and to attempt to understand what the 1.5 billion other Muslims on this earth go through for 1/12 of their life. (It’s not easy, by the way).

To me, the most important thing I experienced over the past seven months was gross violation of work-life balance. I worked longer and harder in the past seven months than I have ever worked in my life. For those of you who are reading this and know a bit about my personal and professional history, you will understand that this means that I worked too hard. There's a point of saturation, in which your waking life becomes your work life and your sleeping life also becomes your work life and recreational life becomes your work life and you realize that it is all just too much. Around this same time, I also realized that the company I was killing myself to work for was really not at all worth killing myself for and so I made the scary decision to leave my job.

Right now, I am at the end of a two-month contractual resignation period and will soon be unemployed. Luckily, Modou and I were frugal with our meager means and will be okay financially for a little while until we can figure out our next steps. I already have an inkling as to what those are, but I don't want to write anything until I am really sure.

All that I am sure of 100% is that I made the right decision to leave this job and I feel proud that when I came to a real crossroads in life, I was able to choose the relationships with my family and my friends and my fiancé above the comfort, stability, and money that came along with a job that I had come to hate. Now, the challenge becomes avoiding getting myself into a situation where I have to choose between those two things when the stakes are higher (like when I have a mortgage to pay or kids to support). I'm sure I'll be able to figure that out with all the free time I will have now that I am (almost) unemployed...