The Plan: Start Where You Are

When I’m working with my clients, this is the advice I give them. If they never listen to another word I say, I hope they get this deep down.

Start where you are.

It makes no sense to start anywhere else.

But isn’t so easy to jump ahead? To pine for sometime in the future, or morn some time past? Isn’t is simple to look at someone else and try to start where they are?

But you can’t. You just can’t. Where ever you are, you’re at the starting block.

And so I have to start where I am when it comes to The Plan. Where I am clearly isn’t where I want to be, or there would be no need for The Plan in the first place, right? Just like if my clients already knew how to just not respond to depression/joy/boredom/excitement by getting wasted, I would be out of a job.

So where am I?

No matter how badly I want to move to Seattle in six months, I’m at the point of having to really accept that isn’t where I am. It isn’t where my family is.

Adrienne will be a senior next year. She could stay here with her dad and finish that year. But the truth is I’m not willing to give up my last year with her. She doesn’t want to stay with her dad either. But she also doesn’t want to go to Seattle for senior year, no matter how much I talk it up.

If we leave in six months, we can have some money saved up. But if we wait another year, we can go ready to buy a house. We can also be out of debt except for student loans. And prop up our credit some.

In 18 months I’ll be on the last legs of my Bachelor’s degree. I can work on my MFA either at Goddard with a residency in Port Townsend, or at a local university.

 In 18 months I will have almost four years experience as a counselor. I run the whole drug court treatment program here, something that is really unheard of for an intern and that I wouldn’t have been able to do in a bigger city. It’s good experience, no matter how crazy the job tends to make me. Kevin will have almost 4 years experience as a pit boss–again experience it would have been hard to get in a bigger city.

Patience isn’t my strong suit. Once I decide I want something, I have a tendancy to want it now. Luckily for me patience is Kevin’s specialty. He has a way of supporting my crazy scheme’s without letting me go off the deep end.

This is where I am.

Now how am I going to take advantage of it?

• Work on getting out of debt in the next 18 months
• Save as much as possible
• Work on making it possible to live in our new place as a writer
• Research. Research. Research.
• Visit different places
• Get healthy (ie gluten-free, eating disorder free, etc.)

This is what The Plan is for.