I sat next to my mom on the beach and considered how similar we were in regards to career drive and ambition. It was Mother’s Day, and I was five days post-surgery. We were sitting on the seawall because I wouldn’t make it up and down the stairs to the sand. Technically I wasn’t supposed to even be walking yet, but I needed to get out of the apartment.

I buried my feet in the sand and thought about what she was suggesting. “All I’m saying, Holly,” she said, “is that you might want to take it a little easy. Maybe you just slow down this year. Don’t make any big changes. Don’t move, don’t change jobs, don’t start any companies, don’t take on anything extra besides work. Just be for a while.”

Who wouldn’t want to be told to do less, I wondered. Who wouldn’t want the opportunity to be lazy? And there it was. Right there. Lazy. Kicking ass at a full-time professional job, being in a wonderful committed relationship, writing two blogs, and founding a professional organization is lazy? I’ve always pushed myself to be more, better, faster. If I wasn’t the only person doing it, I’d better be the youngest person doing it. If younger people were doing it, I was doing more.

I’ve been teetering back and forth on whether or not the women in my family have bodies that are just not equipped to handle stress, or if we put an extraordinary amount of stress on ourselves which affects our bodies. Two of my aunts have battled cancer, breast and brain. My mother was emitted to the E.R. with chest pains for the first time at 42. The pre-cancerous cells my surgery and biopsy had revealed were most likely the result of stress, my doctor warned me in her office.

I had my first nervous breakdown as a high school junior. I was working part-time, volunteering in an at-risk school, going to school full-time, taking 4 Advanced Placement courses, and taking a night class at the local college. I crumpled like a ball in the living room when my mom scolded me over the laundry. It didn’t really slow me down though. By my senior year I was going to the local college full-time in place of high school classes, with the same extracurricular schedule. Who was I if not all those things – a star student, an impressive application/ resume, a good employee, a girl on the make?

So maybe that’s why I wasn’t surprised when my doctor eyed my chart after the second round of biopsies and said that the past three months of low-stress living hadn’t made a difference. Hadn’t I spent most of those three months stressing out about how to maintain my immense checklist of “low-stress” things to do? Wasn’t it only the last few weeks where I let myself go to whatever the results were, left it in Something Larger’s hands?

One painful, frightening surgery later (which I had um, postponed by a month so I could launch a professional organization), I sat next to my equally driven mother and took her words of advice. She knew. She was still pushing and climbing at 50. “It’s always there,” she said of ambition. “It’ll be there in a year.”

Who am I if not a ladder-climbing employee, a twenty-something entrepreneur, a moonlighting freelancer, The Person in Town Who Knows About That, a woman on the make?

I guess I’m a woman taking it easy.

Tempering my ambition and drive is something I’ve got to figure out in my life, otherwise this thing, this cancer is just going to keep coming up. And the risks are just too great to ignore.

And while I made up my mind on the beach that day, it wasn’t until today I had to act on it. I turned down a $500/mo. freelance gig. And it was in a type of work that I love and have wanted to do more of. I even initially agreed, but backed out after a long talk with my boyfriend and lots of prayerful contemplation this weekend. It was probably one of the hardest things, besides the surgery, I’ve had to do this year.

My greatest fear in giving up this year to maintaining the life I already have is that I will miss out on something, some opportunity, some chance, some big life-changing event. Then I realize that I just went through the life-changing event. I came head-to-head with so many fears over the six months I endured biopsies, waiting periods, immune system boosters, and surgery. In the end, if I don’t learn how to slow down and enjoy what I’ve built, I’ll miss out on so much more.

When things ended with Date #4, I made a promise to myself: I wouldn’t get into another relationship for six months. It was clear that I couldn’t handle being in a relationship without losing my momentum in other areas of my life, and I was beginning to see a pattern of jumping from one long-term relationship to another. I’d been a serial monogamist since I was 14. One relationship after another. Some started before others had even ended. It was time for a change.

So, no relationships for six months. I decided that they were simply too big a distraction for the kinds of big things I was trying to achieve – applying to business school, saving for my first house, climbing the corporate ladder, crafting my own business, etc.

Did that mean I wasn’t going to have sex for six months either? I mean, let’s be realistic here. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I don’t really have it in me to sleep with someone I’m not romantically interested in, or rather couldn’t be romantically interested in. I tried the “friends with benefits” thing with GIWS, who actually ended up becoming one of my best friends after our relationship ended, but that got messy fast and I decided for the sake of our friendship that needed to be an “emergencies only” kind of thing.

New Year’s Eve rolls around. And I pick up a guy in a bar. And take him home. Ahem. I. Do. Not. Do. This. OK, well I haven’t done it since like, college. But I sort of figured, why not? I got home at 6 a.m. and slept the whole next day. Then we went out again, and I got home at 10:30 a.m. the next day. And I got a bad cold.

I’ve come to the rapid conclusion that not only are relationships a distraction, but so is sex. You heard me: sex is a distraction.

The pursuit of, anticipation of, before and after of – major distractions. How much time do women spend shaving their legs, bleaching their teeth, plucking their eyebrows, getting or giving themselves manicures and pedicures, shopping for the perfect ass jeans, putting together an outfit for a night out, doing our makeup, blow-drying our hair, posturing at the bar, convincing ourselves we can hunt down a worthwhile guy in a club when we know it’s not true, talking about it with our girlfriends, wondering if he’s going to call, and if so, when? I don’t even know how to figure out how much time guys spend thinking about it, but it’s safe to assume it’s at least 75 percent of their waking hours.

And at the end of the day, you still haven’t studied for the GMAT. You’re too tired to go for a run, and you get such a bad cold from your lack of sleep due to Mr. New Year’s Eve’s snoring that you have to take an afternoon off of work during a critical proving-yourself-in-your-new-promotion phase.

Is it worth it? Is sex just one really big distraction? It’s exciting, enticing, and when it’s good, it’s even a little dirty. But it’s fleeting. And what’s been passed up, what effort has been skimped, that lasts. A lower GMAT score, a lesser business school. A missed run can equal three missed runs since you got out of your groove, then you run a minute-less-than-average mile at your 5K. And being less than 110 percent on your career? Well, I don’t even need to go there.

Perhaps this is really why there’s such a gap between male and female earning after their 20s. It’s a lot more socially acceptable for a man to stay out of relationships while pursuing his career, or in the words of less eloquent men, “getting their shit together.” But that’s not the case for 20-something women. There must be something wrong with us if we’re not doing the sex-dating-relationships thing while pursuing our career goals as well. Somehow, we are less feminine. We become “career ladies” or are seen as ball-busters. We are told that taking our work seriously makes us masculine, and we are given tips on being sexy and career-driven at the same time. Well, that part is actually OK with me. I was clamoring along with the rest of you for Hilary to get rid of the pantsuit (seriously, woman, wear a skirt!).

I think a lot of young women are not necessarily in the settle-down life stage, and yet still feel pressured to date and search for The One in anticipation of the onset of that life stage. Why not embrace that stage? And if you still have too much on your plate, why not take sex off the menu in favor of something that will have a greater impact on your life than getting laid on New Year’s Eve?

So, I’m off it all. Sex, dating, relationships. All of it. At least while I prep for the GMAT this month. When it comes down to it, I’ve got priorities – too many if you ask anyone around me. And sex just doesn’t make the list.

Yeah. Ask me what I think in two weeks.

Photo by Bottom-Feeder via Flickr.

This is a guest post by Marina Cilona, who writes her own fabulous blog, Connecting Ideas.

When I was younger, at high school or university, I had this concept of a successful person as someone who knew a lot about what they were doing. The successful person I dreamed up in my head had a lot of information and used it to stay in control, move through their day with confidence and ease and solve problems with well-thought about solutions. So for me the key to success has always been knowledge you see, you have to know what you’re doing in order to be successful at it.

I’m not going to lie to you – the successful person I always pictured was me. That was my goal for my job: to have all of the knowledge I needed in order to be confident and strong on a day to day basis. In the past year that I’ve been working I’ve realized that my idea of success was dependent on the assumption that there is a protocol, an established way of doing things, that I would need to learn and become really good at in order to be successful.

Then I got a job in a ‘write your own ticket’ sort of company like so many other new, online media companies are. It’s a company that doesn’t have any age or experience prerequisites for success. It’s a company without an established protocol. Your success in the company I work for depends on how well you understand the fact that anyone can publish and access information on the web. Everyone’s a publisher, a mini media mogul and everyone has control of their attention when it comes to their online viewing. So anything my company publishes online is subject to rapidly changing trends, trends that every single person who uses the net shapes. My boss never lied to me when I started. He said it wouldn’t be easy. It’s supposed to be hard to grasp, evasive even, because online media is not a long established industry. It’s still rapidly developing and that can be hard for someone who had such a simple and static definition of success. How the hell am I supposed to feel successful when there is no established protocol for me to dare I say rote learn and then excel at?

I’ll have days where control will feel too far out of my reach to even connect myself with my original idea of a successful person. My confidence, which is so rooted in my intellectual abilities, my power to actually understand things, will rapidly dwindle and I’ll start to feel that I have no capability. On those days I won’t feel productive or, well, competent and I’ll wonder when someone is going to notice and fire me.

For me these bad days happen when I’m reminded of just how much I don’t understand yet. I work for an innovations company. By its very nature its job is to ‘light up the edges’ by conceptualizing new ways for people to communicate with each other that just don’t exist yet. This means that when I started a year ago I needed to get really comfortable really quickly with not knowing, with just trying and moving forward without clarity. You may say that at 23 I’m still stuck in some adolescent hell where I’ll never build up the confidence to feel successful or truly understand my own capabilities. But it all comes down to learning which makes it worthwhile for me. Even though I’m not learning things that have been tried and tested, I still feel like I’m learning on crack. My fear over how much I don’t know, even on it’s worst days, never makes me want to quit and find a job with more direct tasks and clearly defined project and outcomes. I’m learning too much this way and hey, brick walls are put in place to make sure we understand and prove how badly we want things. So if I want to be successful I need to work harder to understand what that means given the challenges and the unknowns of online media.

The thing is I don’t think I’m alone in this battle. So many jobs that are filled by smart, well-educated and driven Gen Yers are new. They were invented along with new technologies and new ways of doing things that need to be managed and communicated.

If you think this isn’t you, if you think these days never happen to you and you never descend to this level of doubt well I don’t believe you. You may deal with it differently or understand it differently but NO ONE and I say this with complete confidence, spends 100 percent of their time riding the top of the wave. You have to struggle through the current sometimes. Those are the times when you actually learn something and those are the days that I think you’ll feel like you’re working towards your own success.

The point I want to make is that it’s supposed to be hard. But that’s what makes us interesting. Be proud of that. This may not seem like the most profound thing you’ve read but it needs to be written and sometimes, on the bad days, it needs to be reread to remind you of the wall and of why you’re trying to push through it.

Marina writes a blog, Connecting Ideas, about work and relationships (and what happens when you work with your partner). She writes about her thoughts which run the gamut of equal pay, writing, love, intimacy, friendship and generally being in her twenties.

I believe that everyone ought to have a personal board of directors in their life… especially in your 20s. I’m only six years into this (thank god it’s halfway over!), but figuring out finances, romances, career aspirations, and general living sense eludes me from time to time. I seem to bump along fine for a few months, then WHAM! I get something that completely throws me off-kilter. I was just entering shaky ground when I met Jenny Ferry, a life coach.

Now, Jenny and I have never actually met, but I can imagine exactly how she would be from our phone and email interaction. Her warmth actually radiates in every hello via phone and every earnest closing of an email. Not many people can pull off that kind of emotion with sincerity, in this skeptic’s book.

Jenny specializes in helping twenty-something women find direction in whatever it is their having trouble with. We started by identifying what that might be for me. Just picking one or two things to work on was a challenge in and of its self. I believe my words were, “Ugh. Where do I start??” I was working two jobs, running my small business and writing this blog. I was in a new relationship and I was training for a half-marathon. I was just about to freak out.

I took a quick diagnostic survey. The career portion practically leapt off the page at us. That was definitely where we needed to start. Then there was this “fun” category. Fun? What’s that? Work is fun, I said. Heh. We were still going to work on it. “We’ll just sprinkle it in,” Jenny said. I could go along with that.

We tackled my four jobs first. I told her I felt like I had the ability to do all of these really great things, but I didn’t know how to pick just one, or even two to pursue. She helped me break it down and get it on paper. Once we did some simple evaluation and took a look at it, I was blown away. Right there, in black and white, I could see what was most important to me out of my four “jobs.” Blogging was by far and away my number one passion. It was followed closely by my marketing job, then came the café (which lost major points in the income category), and trailing abysmally behind was the one I was putting the most effort into – my IT company. According to that sheet of paper, it was my least favorite thing to do. And I had to agree.

“What can we take off your plate?” Jenny asked. Jenny always asks the hard questions. I drew my breath in sharply and deeply. Hearing me, she said, “Why don’t you spend some time on this one. Let me know what you come up with.” I talked over it with friends, and I thought about it. I looked at that sheet of paper and my decision was clear. I’ve since put the company on indefinite hold. I still have one client who doesn’t require much attention at the moment, but no efforts are being made to attract new ones. I’ve been able to concentrate on my blog more and to scale back my hours at the café so that it’s less work and more just-for-fun.

Jenny challenges me to step outside my boundaries in order to pursue what I want. At her suggestion, I have: asked for my hours to be changed at work, found a mentor at the corporate level, taken a relaxing bath, and have begun researching business schools for my MBA. I didn’t even know I wanted to get an MBA before I started working with Jenny. I was afraid to say that I want the thing that everyone says I don’t need.

One major exercise we did was crafting my life purpose statement. This single sentence would be a tuning fork for my entire life that I could use at any point to see if I was “in tune” with what I felt my life’s purpose was. I was definitely skeptical. After all, I’ve spent at least 14 years trying to find my purpose in life. I was a philosophy major, for crying out loud. In one hour, I’m going to find my life purpose. Yeah, right.

Yeah, right! My life purpose statement kicks some major ass. It is Holly with a capital H. I can go through my week knocking that tuning fork and know pretty much whether or not I’m lined up with my life’s purpose. It soothes me, it invigorates me, but most importantly, it reminds me of who I am and who I want to be. A life purpose statement is really personal, so I’m not going to share it here. You’ll just have to become friends with me and ask.

What Jenny does as a life coach is help define my goal and bring it into focus. We find my obstacles, which are usually my own limits, and then she promptly challenges me to knock them down. She does this with warmth, passion, enthusiasm and empathy. If we were in the same town, I have no doubt every meeting would end with a squeeze. But the woman will make you work – trust me. And in that work, you find yourself. You find these amazing little gems (courage, confidence, self-awareness) that were already inside of you, but you just didn’t know how to access.

I feel more in tune with myself and with my goals, and I feel more confident in the path I’m taking to achieve them. So often my 20s have felt like blindly groping for I-don’t-know-what in a black room. Jenny helps me shed a little light on what I’m looking for and how to grab it.

It just hit me: I’m a writer.

It seems pretty silly that I’ve been blogging here at WorkLoveLife for eight months now, and I’ve only just realized that I’m a writer. This is not unique to me, I know. As blogging becomes more and more popular, others I read have questioned at what point you become a writer. And still others have argued against calling yourself a blogger at all.

I’ve come to realize in the past few months that writing has a place in my soul. It allows me to purge, it allows me to mull and remember, and it allows me to connect. And I love words. I took Latin throughout high school, which really boosted my vocabulary. I love the idea in linguistics that the more words we know, the more efficiently and effectively we are able to communicate. I love finding the perfect word or set of a words that most accurately conveys what I’m trying to say. And I even like that I can’t always find them… indescribable is a good place to be, in my book.

But today, I realized that I am writer. Not just a blogger or a lover of words or a novice, even.

The past few days have been hectic – work is hectic and I have meeting and appointments crammed into every nook and cranny of my waking hours. This evening is my first free evening since Friday. I have a half-marathon I signed up for in two weeks that I am ill-prepared for. Tonight could be a night for training. But when I asked myself do you want to run or do you want to write? Would you like to do the half-marathon or would you like to write? The answer reverberated throughout my head: We want to write.

So I didn’t bring my running clothes. I brought my laptop. Because when I neglect my running, I don’t feel half so unbalanced as when I neglect my writing.

I’d like to be a great many things in my life, and I imagine I wouldn’t be great at many of them, but it sure would be fun. My life coach says that I should honor the Holly Who Writes if I want to – I don’t have to be the Holly Who Runs Marathons right now. That’s pretty amazing to me. I thought if I was one, I couldn’t be the other.

I know that the Holly Who Runs Marathons is inside of me, but right now, it’s time for the Holly Who Writes to shine through. Not everything has to be done at once, and not everything has to be done to the nth degree. What a concept.

Photo courtesy Shiny Things via Flickr Creative Commons.

My life has been accidental. Not to be dramatic, but even my start was an accident… well, I wasn’t planned anyway. But who has control over their childhood?

My adult life has been scattershot, too much choice equaling paralysis. The only thing I’m sure I chose with any conviction was my college major, philosophy. Even there though, I never could choose a philosophy to defend and call my own. The only one I pursued with any real enthusiasm was existentialism, that hodgepodge of thinkers who couldn’t settle on a name of their own or even agree that they were in the same school of thought.

That’s not to say I lacked conviction. Let’s get that straight. After all, I think that’s what I write about – conviction searching for direction.

Here I am, though, four years after graduation, in a city I never meant to stay in, in a job I took because it was available, waiting to hear about a job I’m not sure I should take, except that it would bring about a desired effect – the removal of me from this town. (If you are reading this, dear potentially future employer, don’t worry – I am a terrific hire. Ask anyone.)

I can feel it creeping up in me now, however. Freedom. Options. An opinion.

The past few weeks have been such a struggle. I felt like everything was cloudy – even my face was cloudy, my thoughts, everything. I was so afraid I wouldn’t make it out of that fog. Then I recognized it; I remembered that the fog always brings clarity, that the pain precedes growth. I could feel it, but didn’t know what was growing, improving. I’m blind to that stuff a lot of times.

It hasn’t cleared up entirely, but it’s so light I can tell it’s almost over. I’m beginning to know what I want now. It’s so simple, I think I probably knew before but clouded it all up with other people’s ideas, what other people wanted for their own lives, thinking somehow it would be easier to want what they wanted, that what I wanted wasn’t enough, but I realize now that none of that matters. There really are no standards for life, no measuring sticks or rulers.

What brought me out of the fog was a perfect, turbulent storm. As it got stormier, I knew I just needed to ride through it, weather it.

And finally, I was present.

I stood perfectly in that moment, though it was a sad, heartbreaking moment, and I savored it for what it was – one moment in my journey.

When I was in that tailspin, I wanted to be anywhere other than where I was. Ballerinas keep themselves from getting dizzy while they spin by focusing on one spot with each revolution. When I stood still in my moment, not wishing to be anywhere except right there, I stopped spinning. Everything was clear.

While I never really know what one day will bring after this one, I’m done living life on accident. I’m not sure what form my purpose will take, but I know what it is. And that’s enough for today.