I have done that more than once. I talked about it elsewhere and said this: I have kind of had three dramatic career changes. I feel they all have gone really

I have done that more than once. I talked about it elsewhere and said this: I have kind of had three dramatic career changes. I feel they all have gone really well, but I think most people think I am a basically a huge failure and total loser. In high school, I was one of the top 3 students of my graduating class. I had the highest SAT score of my class. This helped get me named Star Student and won me a National Merit Scholarship. I was expected to have a very serious career. I had only two real goals: Get away from my home state and deal with my personal problems. I was aware my health was frail thus joining the Army was a no go, etc. I opted out of my scholarship, quit college, married some guy whose only dream was to be a soldier. I hid my unemployable status under the nifty title of homemaker for a lot of years. So, I successfully left the fast track for a position that would not kill me. That was career change one. Finally getting a diagnosis for my condition helped empower me to leave my marriage. I had been going to college on and off. My goal was to trade in my homemaker title for the title of urban planner. As part of that effort, I got a certificate in GIS and applied to an internship with a national lab and ran a planning subforum on a statusy planning discussion board for a time. My resume had a high call back rate for getting me interviews but I kept flopping in the interview. I ultimately ended up at an entry level job at a Fortune 500 company. That was career change two as I successfully left behind being a homemaker. Although the job was unrelated to all my career goals and training, it paid better than minimum wage and was oohed and aahed over by most folks with whom I made small talk. Just working at that company was a feather in my cap in the eyes of most locals. I might have stayed and climbed the corporate ladder, but I had dreams of getting healthy that conflicted with that path. This led to dramatic career change number three. At some point, I quit that job in order to focus on getting well and work on developing an income stream that won't keep me sick. I do freelance writing and I am developing some web projects that generally suck less than they used to. It has been slow and frustrating and I am aggravated at how little I make, etc. But if you understand what I am up against -- and I do, even though most other people do not -- it is actually going swimmingly well and is basically wildly successful. But I really have a very hard time convincing others of that fact, so I hesitated to answer at all because how others see me is dramatically out of step with how I see myself. I still look to most people like a total fucking loser and there is nothing to be gained by arguing about it. So I mostly try to avoid arguing about it and try to just keep working on my goals in as focused a fashion as I can manage, given my health problems and other challenges. Best of luck.