The Life I Want Project's New Chapter
A sad goodbye to Christine, who is leaving to *live* the life she wants, while Eva continues this storytelling project about a future of work that works for our lives.
For the past two-plus years, Christine and I have exchanged letters through a Google doc dubbed “The Life I Want Diaries.” I logged our first entry on June 11, 2020, around the time Australia locked itself down from the rest of the world. “Dear Christine,” I wrote. “Welcome to The Life I Want Diaries, letters between us about things we are thinking, experiencing, reading, and listening to related to our project together.”
Christine logged our last entry on July 30th this year, writing at 6:30 a.m. “in Mac,” short for McMinnville, Oregon, where she lives with her family. “OMG, Eva, this is so exciting!!” she wrote, replying to a life update I had shared.
Our missives—more than 150,000 words spilling over nearly 300 pages—read like a time capsule: the hopes and delights, frustration and despair of two twin moms living and working in two different hemispheres during a generation-defining period of time.
I have never written so much in my life as I did during that period, and I’m grateful to Christine for creating that space with me as a writing partner, both in the LIW Diaries and the Life I Want storytelling project.
Which is why it’s bittersweet to see this chapter come to a close: As Christine has shared in a recent blog, she has decided to leave the Life I Want project so she has more time to live the life she wants. I’m grateful for our partnership these past few years—Christine joined me in this exploration at a critical time and helped build and elevate this storytelling platform—and I’m excited to continue carrying the Life I Want project forward, as the question about how to shape work so more people can live the life they want is more relevant than ever.
Orienting life around your own true north
When I started this project in October 2015, just a few short weeks after I began working for myself, I set out to share stories of people building work around their life rather than letting work define their life. My family and I were on this journey, and I couldn’t find a playbook on how to do what we were doing—how to not put work first and instead orient your life around your own true north. I decided to write one.
I’ve always found wisdom in the stories of normal people. Not the accomplished outdoor athletes who graced the covers of Outside magazine, where I started my career, or the leggy models and celebrities we used to profile when I was an editor at Fitness, but the everyday people who were figuring things out in everyday ways. I was drawn to real people and real lives.
When I was in college and started thinking seriously about my life and career as a journalist, I was moved by Studs Terkel’s seminal book, Working, published four years before I was born. In Working, Terkel profiled real people: a waitress, cab driver, press agent, and more than a hundred others, who shared with him the textured details of their work and lives. An oral historian by trade, Terkel took the time to listen to and bring to life people’s stories. Reading their words, I began to understand the wisdom that “normal” people have to offer. Their lessons were not neatly packaged work-life hacks, but the gritty and tender and humble insights that one earns over the course of a life.
I decided to follow in Terkel’s footsteps with my blog new series, profiling real people and their efforts to create the life they want.
When I launched this project, my family and I were going through some big changes: I had quit my job and begun working for myself. My kids had started their first year of public school, giving us a little more financial freedom after five years of paying for daycare and preschool. My husband, Adam, had left his job as well. Our plan, years in the make, was to move to Adam’s home country of Australia, where we’d live on the vineyard Adam had planted on an empty sheep paddock he bought in 2005. In the intervening years, while working as a winemaker for a large company, he had slowly built up his ATR Wines business, as well as our future family home.
In 2016, we embarked on our big move, first from Oakland to Oregon, to spend a few months near my dad and his wife and my mom and her husband, and then to Australia, to our vineyard outside a small country town in Western Victoria.
I felt apprehensive when we set off for Australia. Toward the end of our long flight, my daughter had finally fallen asleep in my lap just before we landed in Melbourne. As I stroked her forehead and watched her peaceful face, I thought, “What are we doing to your life? What if we screw everything up?”
By the time we started our new lives, new work, and new school in our new country, this question gained more urgency. I threw myself into paid work. Building financial security was one thing I could control. It was also necessary: As Adam grew his business, we relied heavily on my income as a freelance writer and editor. I was also on point as primary parent as Adam managed every role in his business: pruning the vines, mowing the rows, making the wine, cleaning the equipment, sketching the label designs, managing sales and distribution, and promoting his brand in the market.
My life was full, and I set aside my research and interviews, with a plan to put more energy into the Life I Want project once things were settled. But as I endeavored to live the life I want, some key ideas about the project started to gel: Working for myself, I found that I could shape my work around my life. Flexibility was essential. I began to joke with friends that I was “ambitious until 3 o’clock,” working diligently during school hours so I could be fully present as a mom when I picked up my kids after school.
As a writer and editor doing mostly asynchronous work, I scheduled calls with my American clients in my morning when time zones aligned, and focused on deep work at the end of the American work day. I could get more done in less time.
By maintaining a small client list, I was able to give each client dedicated attention, providing them with more value. This helped me cultivate strong relationships with clients who were, in turn, willing to schedule around my time off, which I take during the kids’ school holidays four times a year. This not only gave me more time with family, it saved us money. We don’t pay for summer camps, which are rare in Australia anyway because people here get more time off—many even get paid extra for the holidays. (We also get affordable healthcare.)
Over the next two years, I got into a nice rhythm, earning what I needed to support my family, having the time to be present in both work and life without burning out, and sustaining fulfilling and long-term relationships with my clients and deep, meaningful time with my family.
A writing partnership: the ultimate Life I Want ‘hack’
By 2018, it was time to pick my passion project back up, carve out more time to write the Life I Want stories. That’s when I got an email from Christine: “Heading your way, sort of,” she wrote. Christine had recently quit her full-time job, and she and her family were moving to Bali (my hemisphere!). When we finally caught up by phone, we found we were exploring many of the same questions about the role of work in our lives, communities, and society. I asked if she wanted to join The Life I Want project, and in 2019, we set up the Life I Want domain, migrating the project over from my website.
Christine joined the Life I Want at an important time. I had the time and energy to invest more in this project again, and yet I didn’t want it to overtake my life. While I don’t usually believe in work-life hacks, it felt like sharing the project with another twin mom with similar life goals would be the ultimate hack.
Ours was a fruitful collaboration, and I’m grateful to Christine for partnering with me from 2019 till 2022. She’s a talented writer and platform-builder. This project benefited from her thinking, the stories she shared, and her little-known artistic abilities (this woman can sketch!). But what I’ll miss most is our diaries: that was a sacred writing space, and knowing she was on the other end of our Google doc was meaningful to me, especially during the pandemic.
What’s next for the Life I Want?
As I have for the past seven years, since I embarked on my own Life I Want journey, I’ll continue this project, sharing my stories, stories of others, and deep dives on themes that can help us all rethink our relationship with work, as individuals and as a society. Changing our relationship with work is not a simple fix, but it is something we can make progress on through small changes.
I still believe there’s wisdom in stories, especially those that ignite something within us—that recall some experience or idea of our own, or make us wonder about new possibilities. Everyone’s path is unique, and I have always felt it’s best to gather a collection of insights and weave them into the tapestry of your own life. I’m a much bigger fan of choose-your-own adventures than work-life hacks.
When I started the Life I Want project in 2015, I planned to write a playbook on how to live the life you want by building work around your life rather than letting work dictate your life. Years ago, I worked as an outdoor guidebook editor, and now I’m toying with the idea of writing a different sort of guidebook: Instead of directing you to remote wilderness locations, this book would help you discover your own North Star, with journeys oriented around different values or priorities you want to honor in your life. These North Stars would be something other than Work—things like Adventure, Care, Community, Rest, Purpose, and Justice. And the guides would be like you and me, everyday people, who are figuring it out as they go.
I’m curious to hear from you: If you could orient your life around a priority or value that’s meaningful right now, what would that be? Drop me a line at eva@evadienel.com.
I appreciate Christine, and I want to take a moment here to thank her for building up this community with me. If you will miss her writing, as I will, be sure to follow her latest updates on her website.
You can read more about the Life I Want project and sign up for the newsletter at www.thelifeiwant.co.
As for my exciting life news I mentioned in our LIW Diaries, I’ll be sharing that with this community soon. Stay tuned!
Warm regards,
Eva