I'm an attorney in solo practice, working as a contractor/per diem for a few other firms. It's a good life in a few ways. I don't work 40 hours every week, and in theory I have a lot of opportunities to travel. In practice, though, I'm a slave to my work, things always take longer than they're supposed to, and I haven't gotten to travel for myself much lately, in spite of putting tons of miles on my car with regional business trips.
I think I'd be okay with being a slave to my work for a little while if it meant knocking out debt and building up savings, but that hasn't been happening. I have depression/bipolar and ADHD and it's hard for me to stay focused on work long enough to ever get caught up, and I only feel motivated when I'm either broke or under the gun, both of which skyrocket my stress and end up putting me in deep depression after the momentary situation resolves. It just doesn't seem very sustainable.
I'm looking at my whole life and I feel like a disappointment to myself. I'm broke and in debt, I'm not active enough, I'm never happy about my work, and I don't really feel proud of anything. I feel like I desperately need a major change, but I feel trapped, mostly by debt. So I keep practicing law even though I'm starting to hate it, because it's the only way to earn even as much as I'm earning without being a wage slave for over 40 hours a week.
I keep thinking about just running away from everything. I have a small military pension for my mental illness because it's been deemed partly the Navy's fault. It's not much, but if I wasn't in debt, I could live on it. And it's "judgment proof" which means at any moment I could just quit working and stop paying my bills, and after they take my car and my house they can't do anything else to me and I have enough money to live a (very) humble life, maybe even move into a van and live on the road.
I could do that, but it would be a one-way ticket with no turning back, and I'm not quite ready to give up on the regular world altogether.
Right now, though, I really wish I could reboot. I want to go back to college and retrain into a completely different field, probably programming or engineering, and start another career with a higher steady income and work just until I'm out of debt. But that would mean more student debt, and I'd be over 40 when I graduated. It sounds crazy.
I'm not sure this is quite the right sub, but I'm posting here because I feel like there may be people here who've faced similar personal crises. What did you do? How did you escape the debt/work trap? Did anyone here just walk away, or start over in something completely different?
Submitted May 12, 2017 at 03:56PM by ManicGoneWild http://ift.tt/2r9rpBs
