Stuck in a Rut

It's hard to explain just how 'stuck in a rut' I felt after realising that i'd spent over 12 years in the trade as a Boilermaker, and I didn't wanna do it anymore. I mean, I was pretty good at it and I was grateful for the opportunity to get good at the craft, but along the way i'd lost all passion for it. I wanted to grind off the shackles and give something else a crack, but I had no idea how I was gonna do it.

Now I know i'm not alone in this, there are plenty of tradies out there like me that feel the exact same way, and I know this because most of my mates are tradies and plenty of those blokes are in the same boat as I was. The boat that felt like it was always trying to row upstream, getting nowhere fast.

After a couple of years of waking up at the crack of dawn each day with zero energy and no purpose, driving to work with my iced coffee and a dirty old sausage roll in hand (and feeling like this was probably as good as my day was gonna get), I started to feel a bit numb.

By the age of 31, i'd spent pretty much half my life getting up and going to work as a tradie (previous to being a Boily I was a concreter) and I was now at the point where I felt like I was banging my head up against a brick wall each day.

Not finishing grade 12 and going straight out of high school into a trade made me start to believe that my options were really limited, and I kept thinking that being a tradie was all I was ever gonna be in this life. I wasn't 'qualified' to do anything else.

I remember saying to myself many times, "I don't even know WHAT other careers are out there... all i've ever known is this tradie life".

My best friend (who also happens to be my wife), saw how much I was struggling and she would try and help me through it, but she'd end up looking at me with despair because she couldn't help me with this inner struggle. It was something I needed to sort out myself.

All I knew was that I wasn't getting any younger and the only way to get out of the rut was to take one step forward into the unknown. I had to do SOMETHING and just see where it took me.

One day at work during smoko I decided "Righto f*ck this, enough's enough"... here started my journey.