There are lots of moments I could point to as important in my life, decisions I ended up making, etc., but I think there are two major things I worked through/around that help define where I am in life right now. One is more professional than personal, but hey.

The first was at the end of the fourth year of my five-year elementary teaching degree program. I had a bit of trouble that year, a bit of burnout, and for the first time I didn't end up with straight-A grades in every subject. During that year's practicum teaching Grade Six students I struggled internally with the growing knowledge that I didn't want to teach for a living. I could do the work and get through it, but it didn't make me happy, it didn't leave me satisfied; it only made me feel sick with anticipation every day. I really ought to have known beforehand that as an introvert, teaching likely wasn't for me, but that practicum slapped me in the face with it. Too many people, too many issues, too much social energy required. Three weeks into it I felt drained and unhappy.

I needed to decide what to do. Should I push through and try to finish the program, even though the final year was essentially a four-month-long full teaching practicum compared to the six-week partial practicum that was already grinding me down? Should I persist when I already knew that I didn't want to wake up every day and do this for a living? What would I do if I quit? How would I get along in life? Had I just wasted four years for nothing? It was a profoundly unhappy period in my life, and I didn't know what to do.

In the end I decided I needed to quit the program, against the advice of my parents. Driving away from the school after telling my practicum teacher and my program adviser, I felt about as low as I ever had at that point in my life. I had no idea where I was headed or how I would get there. I felt an urge at the time to just point my car to the horizon and drive and drive until I found somewhere new, but I didn't. I went back home and got a job in a bakery, but I couldn't get enough hours and within a few months I was on the verge of being broke. I left and ended up moving back in with my parents. My father was not impressed, but they were good about letting me live with them.

Fortunately I was able to secure a job as a journalist shortly afterward, and spent the next five years gainfully employed, building experience, and able to earn a living on my own through my writing skills. But the decision to leave the teaching program was a tough one at the time.

Second, and more personal, about a year ago I had to deal with my fiancee leaving me after seven months of engagement. I had met her, dated her, moved to a new city for her, gone through a period of unemployment, found a tough job that demanded a lot of me and would require a second job in the summers, then miraculously secured an amazing job as a technical writer that would allow me to support us both and have a financial future. At that point I'd proposed to her, and she'd said yes and we moved in together.

Things generally went very well. We got along most of the time, we worked well together, we were starting to plan for the future. The only problem was that she liked to eat a lot of different types of food, and I'm a bit of a picky or reluctant eater. She would get frustrated when I had trouble with certain dishes, and even though I was working to try to incorporate more tastes into my palate, she ended up unhappy with my efforts and feeling as though she didn't want to raise a family with someone who wouldn't happily eat whatever was set before him. She felt through this issue that I was not a dedicated enough person for her, and so she left.

It was a very big blow to me, emotionally. My time with her was easily the happiest of my life. Afterward I alternated between handling it well and not handling it well at all. It made me question a lot of things about myself. After she was gone, I cut back on things like video games and tv shows. I didn't know what to do, and to be quite honest I'm still not fully recovered. I know that's a little sad, but I don't make friends or fall in love easily, and when I do I do so very deeply. I buried myself in reading for a time, and then I renewed my passion for fiction writing. For the past 125 days or so I've been writing a novel, working on it every single day after work and every single weekend. I have no social life to speak of, but I don't really feel the lack. What I do feel is a little disconnected from the people around me. I'd like to be in a relationship again, but I have trouble finding anyone who interests me enough to make it feel as though it would be worth my time. I always end up wanting what I had before, what I lost, and feeling as though anything else would be a waste of time I could better use for writing.

I don't feel depressed, but there are obviously still issues I'm working through. I feel happy when I write, so I write all the time. Part of me wonders when that will change, and another part doesn't want it to, because I don't feel as though I'm any good at finding any other sort of happiness. If I can't find the right person, someone to excite me again, then I might just not be cut out for relationships. I worry that if I entered into a relationship with someone who wasn't perfect for me, I could end up unhappy. I sometimes feel as though quiet, solitude, and stability might be the best I can hope for. Then I remember how happy I was with her, and wonder if I might just be hiding from the world because I don't want it to bite me again. This situation remains in flux.

But on the bright side, I'm damn well eating the food I want to again, and enjoying every bite of it.