My Pursuit of Happyness

I realize there are millions of people all over the world going through terrible struggles and heartache everyday and that most everyone, hopefully, is working towards finding their happy place. I would never want to compare my self-induced drama to other’s true and real devastations that are out of their control or their ability to fix. I can fix mine, it just takes a little bit of out of the box thinking.  It is very uncharacteristic of me to get personal on such a public format, well really on any format, but it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone reading this that the last 12 months in the world of Amy have been very difficult. Somewhere in between belting out Kelly Clarkson’s angry girl lyrics repeatedly and watching the public education system go up in smoke, I realized if anything were to change I was going to have to make it happen. It was time to make a decision.  Either 1. Give up the dream of what you were born to do (at least temporarily) and make a new plan or 2. Find a more creative way to do it. Enter Stage Right - South Korea.


There are a hundred reasons why I made this decision but instead of boring you with that, I’ll round out the top five (in no particular order). I apologize now for the length of this one…I can almost promise that this will be my longest blog ever.


#1. After almost 7 years of living here I am bored to tears in Orlando. Once you leave the Wonderful World of Disney, you realize how wonderful those 47 square miles of imagination really are. Everything you could ever need or want could all be found by simply following those giant purple road signs. You would never even have to get on I-4,  except to go to the airport to visit family I suppose. If you’ve never worked for the infamous mouse you can never really understand it, but once you live the magic it becomes part of you. It stays with you everywhere you go and there is always that little whisper in your head reminding you how much you miss it. (I shouldn’t have left Disney, but you’ll never get me to say that out loud.)

Another reason - I want to teach. I have always wanted to teach. I spent the majority of my adolescence working and volunteering in different schools preparing for a lifetime of teaching.  The classroom is where I belong. It was the aforementioned Disney magic that got me off track in the first place. So since I chose the worst possible time in American history to come to that realization, I will go teach somewhere else and Obama can fix the education system while I‘m gone. I’ll come back when they are hiring teachers again.

The purgatory that has been the last twelve months of my life is #3. Losing the most intimate friendship you have ever experienced is devastating at best. It doesn’t matter if that friendship ends by death, divorce, dramatic implosion…. Or maybe that friendship had just run its course. Maybe you had accomplished everything that you were brought into each other’s world to do and now it is time to learn to let go. But that doesn’t make it any easier.

#4 is an equally large (if not directly related) problem - I’ve lost my happy. I don’t know where she went. And my confidence has abandoned me as well as I have been so frequently reminded of lately. I may lack a lot of reasonably necessary traits but confidence has NEVER been one of them. The last eight months every bit of energy I had was put towards one single goal -  Just keep breathing, just keep moving forward. So as I begin my travels to South Korea I am in search of my happy and my confidence as I am sure they are rocking out together in SoKo as I type this.

Last, but most important, the wiener dog can come. I know you were on the edge of your seat….

So here I am about to embark on 26 hours of travel, with my animal stuck somewhere down by my luggage, and beginning the adventure of a lifetime. When your world turns upside down (or if you are just bored with the status quo) you can sit around and bore everyone with self-pity (I’ve done that too) but eventually you need to pick yourself up and focus forward. This is my “Eat Pray Love” story, my “Pursuit of Happyness.”  I am barely in my 29th year on this planet and I am ready to change everything.  As a very good friend put it …

Pause. New Movie.