I'm not going to jinx anything by suggesting that sometimes things in my life seem almost fated, but ... sometimes things work out.

Five and a half years ago I dropped out of my Bachelor's of Education program because I decided I didn't want to be a teacher, leaving four years of education behind with a mere Associate of Arts degree to show for it. I quickly went broke and moved to a new town to live with my parents for a bit and save up money to attend journalism school.

Within three weeks of moving to the new town, a journalism position came up with a local weekly newspaper. I applied and one day later was offered the job, becoming a journalist without the educational background. I did that job for five years before a lady changed everything.

I met her online, and after most of a year of trying to meet someone and failing to make more than friends, everything clicked together and within a month we were dating. The trick was that she lived in a different town, two and a half hours away.

I made the trek every weekend but after a few months this began to conflict with my job, so I made the big decision. I left my job and moved to the big city. I had no idea how everything was going to work.

The first issue was housing. Rental units within my price range tended to be a combination of not close to my girlfriend's place and kind of dumpy. I was a little worried, and was very close to settling on something less than ideal when I found a decent-sized, mostly clean, reasonably affordable place literally on the same block as my girlfriend's place. It had just become available for the first time in six years. If that weren't enough, the landlord, out of all the people in Calgary, knew who I was -- he was originally from the same place I worked in as a journalist, and was a subscriber to my newspaper. How's that for coincidence?

So now I had the wonderful girlfriend and the nice place to live. All I needed was a job that would pay my bills. So I applied to jobs. And I applied some more. I kept applying until I had reached 70 applications without anything more than a six-day temp filing job to show for it. How could I come so far only to fall short of everything working out? My girlfriend was growing uncomfortable with my lack of employment and my bank account was draining away.

In that darkest hour I got a job with the Calgary Flames of the National Hockey League, as a copy editor and image archivist. I've been a hockey fan for a long time, so this was a great opportunity. Unfortunately it was not full time, and I wasn't making enough money to cover all my expenses, but it staunched the bleeding and made my life better. I gained some freelance photography opportunities through it and began trying to figure out how to make ends meet through struggling and scavenging for other work that would fit into my wonky schedule. I worked my ass off for two months and was managing to squeak by, but it was about to get tougher. Summer loomed, when the hockey season ends and the hours dry up until the pre-season work in August. I was going to have to find more work.

At this moment I received an email out of the blue, from a job I had applied for two months previously during my seemingly endless job hunt. Apparently it hadn't been filled yet. Within a few days I was at an interview for a full time position as a technical writer and instructional multimedia designer with the provincial health service. The job would, on a yearly basis, effectively double my earnings and eliminate all financial strain if I could stick with it. The job location is, in this entire huge city, a 15-minute walk away from where I live.

I tried not to get my hopes up. I have no full and formal education in these areas because of choices I made as a younger man that didn't work out. At the interview, I learned that two people with Master's degrees in the areas they were looking for had also applied and been interviewed. All I could do was answer the questions and present my writing and editing portfolio, hastily pulled together the night before, showcasing my six years of successful experience in these areas.

Today I was offered the job, and accepted.

The idea of financial security is ... well, it's frankly astounding, fantastic, exciting. It makes me tremble at the possibility of being able to pay all my bills, to afford things without that constant worry that there's not enough money left, to save money for the future, to be able to help my girlfriend and me afford our own place someday, to not have to scramble and scrape to barely make my way. After a lifetime of being on the financial bubble, I can't even tell you what that idea feels like.

I want to dance and sing, and I want you all to know: sometimes things work out.