Recent­ly I had a con­ver­sa­tion with a friend and when I brought up the fact that most of my fam­i­ly isn’t hap­py with my plans to move on to a boat and live in the islands she asked “Will they at least be hap­py for you when you are hap­py?” Of course they will, but I do have sev­er­al rel­a­tives who (like me) have read all kinds of things talk­ing about how life isn’t good or bad. That life is how you see it.

Sure life is what you make it, where ever you are and what ever you are doing, but there are some­thing things that you shouldn’t let go. I mean I’ve read all the books that tell you that it isn’t what is in your life now, but what you are focus­ing on and that all you need to do to be hap­py and ful­filled is to change your focus. I’m call­ing bull­shit on that. Yes, there is some ele­ment of truth to that. If you spend time focus­ing on what you don’t like about your life you will be mis­er­able. But if there are parts of your life that don’t work for you then change them. Don’t say that you should just be able to change your out­look, or even that you can focus on what you want and it will mag­i­cal­ly appear.

I am a pagan, veg­an eco-girl. I also have sev­er­al gay friends who have very dif­fi­cult lives because of their sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion and where we live. I want­ed to be around peo­ple who were more open mind­ed, more eco-mind­ed and that I had more in com­mon with. And I did. I found (cre­at­ed in my life) a job where they sched­ule riv­er and road side trash clean ups, with mul­ti­ple veg­e­tar­i­an and veg­an employ­ees and with all the gay employ­ees nobody seems to sur­vive there if they aren’t accept­ing of that, even though we are in the bible belt. This is pret­ty cool and a good exam­ple of where you can cre­ate in your life with­out major changes. But I found for me it isn’t enough. I want to be in a dif­fer­ent place, I want to be around larg­er num­bers of peo­ple who are like this and I don’t want to be faced with the prej­u­dices and  (and okay I am get­ting judgy,) igno­rances  of the oth­er peo­ple I meet. And dammit I am not going to feel guilty about that.

I am not going to feel guilty or inad­e­quate that I am not meta­phys­i­cal­ly man­i­fest­ing the life I want here. I’m not going to feel guilty that I want to make these major changes to my life. I am not delud­ing myself in to think­ing that if I make these changes every­thing will be peachy and I will live in a love­ly world of sun­shine, rain­bows and world peace.  But it will allow me to be around peo­ple that I can talk to with­out fan­ta­siz­ing about what will hap­pen to them dur­ing the zom­bie apoc­a­lypse.  So I guess the point of this lit­tle rant is that while you should focus on what you like in your life rather than what you don’t it is okay to say “This isn’t work­ing for me any­more,” or “I would rather focus my man­i­fest­ing on this oth­er part of my life.”

So take a look at your life and every­thing you like about it and what you’d like to change. Be brave and make those changes. Even if nobody agrees you should. Most peo­ple will ques­tion your choic­es, but that is anoth­er rant.