My life has been changing the last year or so. I haven't looked back to read what I have written here but what I recall of it comes from a pretty dark place.

Some of the underlying dark things have not changed. I'm not passionate about my job, the way your rows of self-help books or my parents repeatedly hammered. "Do what you like," shout the books and my parents, "and the money will follow."

I have never really found a job or a career that I like.

And I still live in Dayton, Ohio. It was a difficult transition from how and where I lived before, and my entire time here has been under the "Bush Economy". It's not so much the city itself I found awful, but the attitudes and outlooks of the people living in it.

I used to receive some pretty nasty emails and comments about that: What about YOUR attitude, they would say (only a lot ruder).

And they are right. When I periodically looked for a new job in 2006 and again last year, I realized with some dread: I will never find a job or a career I like.

Facing that thought was like looking at your face in the mirror after not having a mirror for something like twenty years, and seeing every wrinkle and scarred skin from teenage acne and hair growing out of your ears where it never used to grow, and you knew all of those things were there but you never really saw it, and This Is You and This Is Who You Are.

And almost overnight, things improved. Abrupt and constant 180-degree turnarounds by management on decisions became no longer a frustration but an expectation that was easily dismissed. It was if I had been the mediocre cousin to Houdini, shifting and struggling upside down, wrapped with chains and bound inside layers of sheets -- only unlike Houdini never able to escape -- and then just when you think you are forever bound, the struggles and pressure mounting as I ran out of oxygen, you are free.

My irritating coworkers no longer bothered me. Let everyone else talk doom and gloom. Let everyone else struggle in the dark. I was already in the dark - why fight it? Learn to live with it. (I may write more details about that in my other blog.)

The same went for my feelings about Dayton. It helped that the one good choice I made was the purchase of my Duplex. It may not be anyone's standard idea of a home, but it has become my sanctuary. I still found it difficult to meet people - I seem to be the target of every unstable person within a 5-mile radius at any social event I attended - but I grew to expect it, playing a game with myself "what Crazy will decide I have personally insulted him/her just by my breathing tonight?" And gradually, I did meet some fun local folks who I liked and who seem to like me.

My fear is that I'm codependent because undoubtedly another factor in the shift is that I met someone who has made me very happy. I hate to consider that my outlook is dependent on another person. It brings up a host of buggies liable to crawl out from under the bed any moment. While I'm not worried about waking up next to a stranger, I'm terrified of the "we grew apart" syndrome that slowly infects so many.

I'm willing to cross that bridge when I get to it.

And now in the last year, I've been promoted. My projects are a success. I'm being sent overseas. Surreptitiously, we're buying a house in Indianapolis. I will look for a new job when I'm back from overseas. I'm meeting with a realtor tomorrow to quietly put the Duplex on the market. It will show well, and I don't think I care if it sells at a loss.