Breaking Free of the Rat Race is SCARY!

I moved away from home right after college, and started my first "big girl" job in a "big city" and was headed down the road called "success". Well, turns out society's version of success and mine are quite different, but I wouldn't have known this if I hadn't spent the last year away from everything I love and know.

And now I am trying something new, I am trying to build a career out of what I enjoy, and so far I haven't completely figured out what that means, but I know that what I had can't be it. And sometimes the best way to figure out you want is to first figure out what you don't want.

If you are experiencing anything similar to this I suggest you watch this video!



This is Water from Patrick Buckley on Vimeo.

Everyone talks about breaking out of your "comfort zone" and to break free of being content and safe, well, it is not easy. Who really is every ready to defy everything we have been taught we must do our entire lives? Separating other people's expectations from your own is hard work, but if you are interested in diving deeper into what you really want, think about these questions:

-Write down a list of what you want
-Now look at that list again and think about which of those come from an internal joy and which come from an external source
-Think about what external source caused you to want (or think you should want) those things
-Now focus on either eliminating those externally driven wants or at least toning down your efforts towards them, and focus more of your energy on the ones that bring you internal joy

The steps above are a combination of questions and ideas from a book I am reading called "20 Something, 20 Everything" by Christine Hassler (which I HIGHLY recommend) as well as this article (but don't be decieved by the title): "The Three Most Important Questions You Can Ask Your Teenager" by Michael Mulligan. Honestly I don't think it should be titled that, but either way it has some really great ideas and concepts in the article that I related to ALOT.
Click here to read the full article, and let me know what you think!

With love,  G

Bucket List: Italy & Greece

Me - "Okay so in about three weeks I won't have a job,"
Sister - "AWESOME! Lets go on the backpacking trip to Europe that we have always wanted to go on!"
Me - "(pause, considering rational things like money, and rent, ehh f*%! it)... I'm in!"

And that's how it happened, we bought a plane ticket to Rome and three weeks later a plane ticket back to the US from Athens, other than that we don't know what the heck we are doing... (If you have any insider tips on things most tourists don't see let me know!) 
So needless to say, I have been obsessively looking at photos of the Greek Isles, and other islands in the Mediterranean, and well... there is no shortage of them. When my sister and I were deciding where we wanted to go and Greece came up, the first thing I though of (as any true 20 something girl should) was Sisterhood and the Traveling Pants. I want to find my Kostas Dunas! Oh and you can bet I will be jumping off that same dock that Alexis Bledel, as Lena Kaligaris, jumped off of in Santori, "can you turn my black roses red!"                           
Anyway... so I will be traveling through these two countries with my little sister. We have never backpacked before, and I have only stayed in a hostel once (and right when I walked in the bar tender puked on the ground and the hostel manager dropped a towel over it and went to bed, good first impression). Needless to say, I am a little nervous, our plan is to bring one of those plastic bed sheets parents put on mattresses for their little kids when they wet the bed, and to put it over the mattress in the hostels and then to lay our sleeping bags on top of that, hopefully eliminating the chance of bedbugs or lice or just sleeping on a bed someone just had a "really good time in", yikes!   

If you have any tips please let me know! :) 

With love, G