The Leap Year Timeline

My life makes sense when you look at it in Leap Years. It’s more confusing to look at my life when you look at every year in between. It’s as if I’ve only ever hit the correct axis of time if you scrunched up the detailed map of my journey to get here—the day before the day that only exists every four years.

If you have ever had the privilege of taking a look at my full resume, you would have gotten lost in the endless list of amazing and ridiculous jobs scattered across all industries. There is no one place on the Internet, yet, where this exists. However, the only reason why it’s never listed all together is that it just doesn’t fit on one sheet of paper printed front and back. With all honesty, it might actually make me look ridiculous that I had so many interesting jobs.

I’ve always had a job on the side that got my hands dirty fine-tuning my writing and editing skills. I craved that challenge, and accidentally began a terrible habit of chronicling my slow progression towards becoming a better writer and sharing it for all the world to see. A lot of the other jobs just make absolutely no sense.

“You had that job with the hypnotist,” my mom pointed out to me over the phone. Her laugh made me giggle at how odd that sounded. It would be a year or so after the hypnotist and, for no apparent reason, that I would end up gaining unnecessary knowledge as a PA while working at FabFitFun, and getting paid to shop at Forever 21 (as their worst floor employee ever) all at the same time.

Later, I would come back home from studying abroad in Italy to have my five wisdom teeth surgically removed the next day, which I would have scheduled a week before I went on a backpacking trip with some kids and a dog in the woods. I realized, after thinking about that entire year alone, that my life was strung together like transitions in a dream sequence.

It’s when you take a step back and look at the entire picture that you see the subtle patterns that can guide you. Your decisions are made from what you have learned from experience, and I suppose, if I have to live a very random life to understand the world better, then so be it. You tend to trust yourself a little more and take risks with calculated decision-making with time and experience. What sways how you lean throughout life is reinforced by your first or secondhand knowledge of everything that you can get your hands on and retain.

I think Leap Years are good years to use a gauge for how well you’re progressing in life. If January and February are any indications of how the rest of this Leap Year is going to go for me, then I’m going to be a little nervous about my life, but I’m also going to be pretty excited.

There are some pretty cool things happening on the horizon, and none of those things are easily achievable. Some of these things have taken or will take on a random path to reach a goal. I half-reluctantly take them on as a “hold my beer” kind of challenge because I’m pretty confident I can handle it. My actions look chaotically lucky, but they’re actually carefully crafted and calculated risks that make more sense looking through Leap Year goggles.