Miranda dragged herself back into her apartment, dreading the return to reality.  As she opened the door, she was met by the stench of dirty laundry sitting in a hot apartment for a week.  Why hadn’t she at least left the air conditioning on low, while she was gone? yuk! She dumped the contents of her suitcase on top of the already smelly mountain of dirty laundry that she had neglected before she left.  She had left so spontaneously that she hadn't even brought clean clothes with her.  She packed her favorite dirty clothes, and washed them at the hotel.  Some switch had flipped in her brain last week, and she just left.  She called ito work to tell them she was taking an emergency mental health vacation.  They didn’t mind, even with no notice.  She’d been there five years, and had never even used a sick day.  Recently she’d been so on edge and grumpy, they had been begging her to take some time off, come back refreshed.  The problem was, she hadn’t come back refreshed at all!  She’d come back completely aware of how out of control her life, her car, her apartment was.  Laundry mountain was just the beginning of what she had come home to.  Also completely aware of every ounce of stress in her body.  How had she never noticed any of this before?  It was all too glaring now!

The truth was, she’d done a lot of thinking while she was gone. Way too much in fact, but once she’d jumped over the hurdle of denial, she knew she needed a change in profession.  She had no idea what she was going to do, or how she was going to live, until she figured it out, but she couldn’t go back there.  She had gone straight from college, to working at the law firm, and until now, had never looked back.  She knew she couldn’t do it anymore though.  She couldn’t deal with everyone else’s problems, and petty lawsuits.  She couldn’t deal with the constant overload of work, and crazy long hours.  She needed to feel free again.  She needed to find herself, and figure out what she wanted out of life.  All she did know, what that she wanted no part of an office job anymore.  That of course left unlimited options, and the thought of starting all over at the bottom of a different career ladder made her want to sit in the corner and cry.  A wave of panic hit her, what was she thinking?  She couldn’t just randomly decide to pick up and change careers, that went against everything...her!  So, of course, did randomly packing a suitcase full of dirty laundry and taking off for a week.  Was she changing that much?  Was she turning into some new spontaneous, intuition leaping person?  She had never been that person, and didn’t know how to become that person.  Apparently though, she already was becoming that person, whether she wanted to or not.