So, I’m sitting here trying figure out what the hell I’m going to do with my life. Great. 35 years old with a wife, four pets, two cars and a mortgage and I want to start with the ‘What do I want to be when I grow up?’ speech. When it comes down to it, I’m pretty darn scared of what is going to happen next.

A little bit of some backstory for those of you who aren’t in the know. In March of 2005 I was supposed to leave my job because I was miserable. At that particular point my client was acting very much like an ass and I was absolutely fed up with their behavior (I’ll talk about them later). Half of my staff, intelligent people that they are, decided to take the opportunity to jump ship. If I wasn’t going to be there, what kind of environment was going to be left? Well, time had ticked down to weekend that I was about to leave. On the very final day, the CIO had asked to speak with me and wondered why I was leaving. I gave him my reasons and he promised that there would be some changes.

Hearing this, I promised to stay if changes were made. To make a long story short, I stayed and half my staff left and initial changes were made. But they weren’t enough. As I spent the six months hoping for the government client to change their behavior and how they do business, things crawled at a glacial pace. So, what should I do? Stay or go?

I felt like utter shit in my job and I felt that both I and the project I was working on was going nowhere. I asked a few people what they thought I should do and the response was pretty much the same across the board: If I am unhappy then I should leave. Of the three people I talked to, BlueSteel from the forums, who I believed to be a very good friend (yet another long winded story), put it as such:

If you can’t make work what you need it to be, and it does nothing but make you miserable, then yes, you probably shouldn’t waste your life at a job you hate, if you have the option.

So I took her advice. My job was sucking the life out of me and I was absolutely miserable. Whereas I used to be absolutely passionate about whatever work I was doing I had come to abhor walking into that office. I used to absolutely love what I did and the people that I worked with. During the last six months, though, my environment change to something that I did not enjoy while my client refused to change or move forward. Almost like two trains going in different directions with me standing between them.

So here I sit, trying to get our websites and mail migrated to a new host and I’m wondering: Did I do the right thing? Will I ever find a job that will make me as happy as I used to be? Will I continue to strive to find something that is more fulfilling than what I had been doing? I dunno. And that’s why I’m scared.