WASHINGTON — The dart hit Montana. So that’s where she was going.
After years of corporate monotony as a database specialist in northern Virginia, Marisa VanDyke was ravenous for excitement. Every day was the same: wake up, go to work, eat dinner, go to the gym, go to bed. To prompt destiny, she threw a dart at a map and suddenly had something to look forward to. She told her bosses she was quitting. They didn’t understand why she’d give up good pay. It was tough to tell her parents, who were happy with her stability. But VanDyke simply stepped off the first rungs of the corporate ladder.
She chucked the idea of Montana and instead drove well beyond there — to Cooper Landing, Alaska, to be a waitress. No health insurance, no safety net, nothing. Then a friend tipped her off to a job in Antarctica.
Why not?
She applied. She got it. The woman who had spent her post-college years in a cubicle was now slinging from one planetary pole to the next.
“The first day I got there, the plane lands on an ice runway,” says VanDyke, 27. “You get off and look around, and there’s nothing for miles. It was negative-80 degrees with the windchill, and my first thought was, ‘Oh, (bleep).’ ”
People start over. It feels right. It feels exhilarating and stupid and like the beginning of something great, moving from one place to another, geographically and psychologically. From enervation to ecstasy. From Virginia to Antarctica, by way of Alaska.
Recently, VanDyke returned to Antarctica’s McMurdo Station for her third six-month stint as a scheduler in the station’s housing department. The Herndon native gets half of the year off, time she has used to travel across the United States and New Zealand. Her vocabulary is rid of the phrase “PeopleSoft help desk, how can I help you?” She’s happy she gave up life as she knew it to find something better, even if the initial step was a plunge into the dark void of doubt.
“I think that not knowing is the best way to do everything,” VanDyke says. “There’s no point in researching it ahead of time and trying to figure out everything. It’s more fun to go and experience it. And now I’m not afraid. I’ll go anywhere and do anything. And I will make it work, because what else can you do?”
It wasn’t a dart that hurtled Gloria Dombo from Ghana, West Africa. It was a lottery.
She never expected to immigrate, never expected to have her name come up in the Green Card Lottery. After all, the United States only picks 55,000 people worldwide each year in the immigration lottery.
But a computer randomly selected Dombo’s name. It was a roll of fate that she couldn’t turn down.
She came alone to Knoxville, leaving a husband and two small children. The only person she knew here was a cousin who had immigrated years earlier.
Dombo, 48, had polio as a child and still wears braces to support her legs. Despite her limited mobility, she took a job as a hotel maid. She worked for six months to save enough money to bring her husband to Knoxville.
Together, they worked another four years to bring their children here. With the help of her church, Dombo returned to Ghana for six months in 1999 to be with her children, who lived first with a grandmother and then with an uncle.
The boys were 5 and 9 when their mother took the opportunity to come to America to build them “a better life.” Dombo says they were too young then to understand the sacrifice. They only knew their parents were gone. Today, Stephen, 17, and Emmanuel, 13, are U.S. citizens, like their mother. Stephen plays on the football and soccer teams at West High School.
Jobs that required Dombo to stand took a toll. She had a hip replacement surgery in 2004.
Dombo’s husband left her in 2005, the same year she became a citizen. The couple’s divorce was final this year.
As a single mother Dombo decided she could no longer rely solely on public transportation. So she learned to operate a vehicle equipped with hand controls. She bought her first car and began driving in June. She already had a Tennessee driver’s license, but had to retest last week on the hand controls. Unfortunately, she failed on her first try and will have to test again to get her driver’s license back.
Dombo earned a degree in accounting from the Tennessee Institute of Technology. She says she couldn’t find a job in that field, but the computer skills she had learned landed her a job in data entry at the University of Tennessee admissions office. She has been at that job for five years.
One of Dombo’s co-workers at UT submitted her story to the News Sentinel. “Gloria has remained through it all a beach of faith, hope and charity,” said the co-worker, who wished to remain anonymous.
“Her attitude is an inspiration to us all. I have only seen Gloria upset once and tired a couple of times. Her attendance and performance at work is exemplary.”
But Dombo won’t take credit for her fresh start.
First off there is the woman she calls “My Angel.” Dombo met her first American friend, Nona Platillero, at a picnic for international students sponsored by Cedar Springs Presbyterian Church. It was Dombo’s 40th birthday and she had been in the United States for two months. She said Platillero’s support put her on the path to changing her life.
But Dombo said it is a higher power that really gave a fresh start.
“Whatever comes my way,” she said, “comes from a faith in God’s plan. All glory belongs to Him.”
Five years ago, Sue Skeith called her husband of 29 years from Heathrow Airport to say she was leaving him, her two grown daughters, her best friends and an outwardly perfect life she’d built for herself in the county of Dorset, England. She felt invisible, her marriage had imploded, and the resentment, fear and anger she’d sublimated manifested in a one-way ticket to Washington.
On the plane ride, she was wracked by disbelief and trepidation.
“I was tortured because I felt guilt-ridden that I’d caused so much pain,” says Skeith, 57, and now living in Gaithersburg, Md. “I am so close to my daughters. I had been this earth mother, and all the kids used to come over to the house. It was a shock to everybody that I could behave in such an out-of-character fashion.”
Skeith stayed with an old friend, Michael, whom she eventually married, but the shock of starting over in a new country was formidable. She found herself dogged by sadness, ignorant of such elemental things as driving, pumping gas, dealing with money and using the phone. Her husband and neighbors helped her ease into the new lifestyle, and her family back in England began to understand that she was happier because of her choice, however inexplicable it first seemed.
“Looking back, I know that the only way I coped was by taking one day at a time, one step at a time,” Skeith says. “I didn’t look at the big picture. If I had, I might never have taken that first step.”
The first step — and continuing to take those steps — is what’s important, says Robert Quinn, author of “Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within” and a business professor at the University of Michigan. “When you go through deep change, it doesn’t matter if you’re wrong,” Quinn says. “It matters that you’re moving.”
There are times in one’s life where we either make a frightening change or continue to die a slow death.
“People will go to great lengths to deny that the external world is changing and needs something else from us,” Quinn says. “We will just stay in the pattern we’ve traditionally succeeded at. If we do that when the world is calling for something else, there’s usually a breaking point where we can’t function anymore, and then we’re forced into some form of that deep change. ...
“There’s great exhilaration in the new identity that starts to form, a greater alignment with the environment you’re in. You expand your consciousness, your awareness and your capacity. That’s always very exhilarating.
Change was forced on Francis Heck when he was fired from his job at age 64.
He’d already made a major career change. After more than 25 years as a salesman for a Knoxville company that sells industrial stone-cutting equipment, Heck was in his early 60s when he was offered the editorship of direct-marketing publication that serves the stone-working industry.
Heck said he increased advertising for the publication and “it took off.” But eventually, he had a conflict with the owner about one of the publication’s policies and he was fired.
So Heck went home and told his wife that he was selling the furniture in one of their spare bedrooms and turning it into an office. The sale of the bedroom suit paid for a desk and two computers.
Heck, 68, started his own independent trade publication for the stone and tile industry. Stone Industry News (www.stoneindustrynews. com) is mailed monthly to nearly 13,000 companies around the country. Some of the recipients bought their first equipment from Heck when he was a salesman. “I know a lot of the major players” in the industry, he said.”
Stone Industry News is in its fifth year of publication. Stone does most of the writing himself. He has no employees. He contracts out the work he can’t do himself. He pays a graphic designer to compose the publication and the printing is done on the News Sentinel presses.
Heck says the business is grossing $250,000 annually “with room to grow.” He pays himself a little more than what he made working for someone else, he says. He doesn’t count his work hours, but he says it’s a lot less than 40 hours a week.
Heck said he made a success out of second career in publishing, an industry he admits to know nothing about when he got started, because he created a product that no one else was offering.
“This has been absolutely the most rewarding, exciting thing,” Heck said. “I can’t complain about anything.”
He said he’d keep running Stone Industry News until someone comes along with an attractive offer to buy him out.
He figures someone soon will “think here’s this old man and he needs to sell that.” And that person best remember that they’ll be dealing with an experienced salesman.
There are no official statistics on Starting Over. There is no Federal Bureau of Sayonara.
But the seeds of existential antsiness are apparent when you look at U.S. job satisfaction numbers, which have corroded over the past 20 years. Consider: More than half of Americans across all income brackets are dissatisfied with their jobs today, according to the Conference Board, a business research group. This is up from 39 percent in 1987.
People change careers every three years on average, says Sarah Edwards, a licensed clinical social worker in California who, with her husband, Paul, co-authored “Changing Directions Without Losing Your Way” and “Finding Your Perfect Work.”
There’s an explanation for this rampant feeling of something’s-not-right. In early life, people fall into two paths, Edwards says. We either follow the career route prescribed by our academic experience or we follow the example or guidance of our parents.
“At the time, we’re so pleased to have opportunities, so we step into things,” she says. “When you’re in your 20s, you’re very excited about life and you want to get hooked up somewhere. And once you’re there, you start saying, ‘Wait . ...’ As we move on into our 30s or 40s, we start to question. ‘How did I get here? Is this where I decided to go?’ People start thinking, ‘What am I doing?’”
In work, several elements foster contentment, says Jessica Schairer, a clinical psychologist based in Los Angeles: feeling proud of what you’re doing, having your co-workers and employers like and respect you, and using talents that come naturally to you.
Satisfaction is compromised if any of these are missing, but it may not be cause for a total life change. It’s important to question yourself before you make the leap.
“Do I need a total change of scene, or do I just need a vacation?” offers Schairer. “Do I need to change my whole entire career, or do I just need to change the company I’m working with? Many times, people think the whole industry they’re working in is terrible, but it’s not. Sometimes you don’t have to change your career; you just have to change your company.”
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