I’ve started writing a new blog post every week, but never seem to get past the first few sentences before life gets in the way. Two weeks ago the post was starting out as a rant on my supervisors at work which then morphed the next week into a panic at my chosen profession and now I’m just getting bitter that I can’t get my work issues to go away in a timely manner.

What’s been making my blog turn into a bunch of starts and stops? A project at work that I did the design for over the summer that is now being constructed and running into a couple issues.  Nothing earth-shattering for the world-at-large. Nothing that will make the evening news. It’s not even anything that I’m going to lose my job over, but definitely something that is not “business as usual” for me and it is another nail in the coffin of my chosen profession.

Those who know me in real life or have read some of my older blog posts know that I’ve been struggling with my career choice for quite some time now. Between the timing of my twins and the timing of the current economic situation of the U.S., I don’t really have the flexibility to change careers any time soon. But I kind of had the wind knocked out of my engineering sails at the end of my tenure with my last job and they’re not really re-inflating at this one. I’m just not excited to wake up every morning and do design work anymore. I enjoy the project management side of things, but I don’t have enough experience to jump into that without having to change companies. It’s possible to pigeon-hole myself into just the materials and projects that I’m better at, but that didn’t work out so well for me at my last company when the economy went down the toilet. I have to expand if I want to stay employable, but I have to figure out at what cost to myself and my family.

Since I’m now at a multi-disciplinary company, I’m taking all the opportunities that I can to expand beyond the limits of my current field, but that really just compounds the issue: I’m kind of good at a lot of things, but not really good at any (that I’ve found yet). There are a lot of things that I enjoy doing, but there are a lot more people out there better at it than I am, so I can’t really make a living at doing a mediocre version.

I’m still working on the question I posed almost a year ago – where do I belong?  I’ve already made the decision to stay in my current town to raise my kids even though that means I’m commuting over 75 miles round-trip every day, but I’m really not ready to relocate to the city where my work is, and I don’t particularly want to up-root my family for a job that I don’t really see myself doing in 5 years.  The company itself is great, but I don’t want to string them along if my heart’s not in it anymore.

I know that theoretically I should be able to put my head down and trudge through it, but that was how I survived the last two years of college and the last 10 years of my current career. I want to stop and look around now. It’s not even that I’m burned out; it’s more like it was beaten out of me.

Any tips for survival? I’m really hoping that the emergence of spring will bring more outdoor activities for me which will help my overall mood, but that certainly doesn’t give me the motivation to get back inside and work!

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