Timeout Society

Tue, 27 Sep 2016 17:08:59 -0700

Thinking about it made my heart race and my fair skin flush. I had played this conversation out in my head a hundred times over, but it was actually happening today.

“We don’t have a mortgage. We don’t have kids. We have a lot of freedom,” I said. “I’m not sure I’ll ever have this time in my life again.”

Adam and I are 35 and 32, respectively, and up until this moment, life was moving fast. Two years prior, I moved across the country from Chicago to Portland (the one with breweries and backyard chickens—Oregon, not Maine). I left a team I loved working with, my family and my friends to live in a city where I knew nobody except the beautiful mountains I had hiked a few months prior.

Within two months of this move, I met Adam. Within 11 months, I accepted a fellowship and spent 30 days in the Brazilian Amazon, where they speak Portuguese and I do not. My eyes were opened to cultures and environmental issues one could never fully grasp until seen in person.

The day I returned from the Amazon, Adam proposed. We spent the next year planning our wedding, saving for a house, saving for a woodworking business—Adam’s a craftsman—and working really hard.

I had to fulfill the requirements of my fellowship, which meant writing 20+ pages of web content, building web pages for said content and editing videos. Then, of course, I had to do my regular job, which included writing content for and building a microsite, managing social media channels, marketing campaigns and print publications.

My chest, my neck and my cheeks were pink. It was clear this was a hard conversation for me to have. Born and raised in Illinois, I have been both blessed and cursed with the “Midwestern work ethic.” If you’ve lived in or known anyone from the Midwest, you know what this means. We’re taught to persevere, have dogged determination and be humble through any success, for it is never your own.

Work ethic aside, I had grown accustomed to...Read More

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