You can’t have your cake and eat it, too! And on the flip side, you can’t wonder if anyone else out there feels like you and whine about feeling lonely once you find your flock :-).
I have two life experiences -slash- communities that have made me feel incredibly lonely in my life. The first was getting a Master’s in Teaching only to have an awful experience and leave the field. The second was finding the Paleo Movement and subsequently finding the Paleo AIP lifestyle that’s even more restrictive.
I’m happy to share that these communities have answered my prayers a thousandfold.
Finding My Flock with Paleo & Paleo AIP
Right away, I was able to connect with the Paleo and Paleo AIP blogging sphere where selfless, knowledgeable people share what they know (and delicious recipes) to help make the lifestyle easier. It was disheartening to learn about how unhealthy mainstream “healthfoods” are (whole grains, egg whites, low-fat dairy) and how much these foods had damaged my body for the 27 years I’d been eating them. But finding a community that understood (and lived out) these principals made me feel a little less crazy.
More recently, JHubbs and I started a local Paleo Meet-Up in our area… and within weeks we had 20+ members! Some are new to Paleo, some are long-time converts, and some are even Paleo AIP. But the ability to meet with people in person and talk about how we’ve taken control of our health (and the things we still struggle with) has improved my quality of life to a crazy extent… and we’ve only really met three times!
Finding My Flock With Life After Teaching
The other lonely event in my life was my short teaching career of two and a half years. Teaching is one of those fields where you’re driven into by a passion to help people. It attracts some of the most selfless, hard-working kinds of people in the world. And, in the 21st century at least, it destroys them.
After I left teaching, I had to find my flock to make sense of what had happened to me and to help others who were experiencing the same situation. I took my experience and wrote an eBook Life After Teaching for other teachers who wanted to get out. I’m working on a new version for April 2015, which means I’m looking at all of my “community assets”: a newsletter of 300+, a LinkedIn group of 70+, and hundreds of sales. These are all people who have felt some version of EXACTLY what I felt as a teacher: lonely, angry, tired, overwhelmed, and finally done with it. And I can’t help but feel incredibly blessed to have found them.
What’s the point of this note? To encourage you to go find your flock. Everything in life that makes us feel lonely is ironically something that other people are experiencing. Some of us are lucky to find those peoples in our immediate circle of friends. Some of us have to go out and hunt them down. It’s so totally worth the effort to find them, though, so I hope you do!
Do you have a flock? Can I help you locate a particular one?
PS If you’re reading via email or RSS, come see who got a facelift!
That is so amazing that you started a meet up! That’s amazing that you have that many people already, too. Way to go :)
Thank you! Yeah, it took some impatience to finally pay to start my own. I’m so glad JHubbs improved that “impulse purchase”!