About

If you have made it to this page, you may be wondering what my blog, Thrive Like Wildfire, is all about…

I started this blog as a sort of therapy for myself. I have so many things i am interested in and so many things I am not. I got really sick of the “Change your life in 10 basic steps” bullsh*t and figured there was no better way to find what I wanted on the internet than to create it myself. I chose to name the blog Thrive Like Wildfire because this blog was created to document my story of finding my fire and all the wild twists and turns along the way. I don’t claim to be an expert on anything, but I am trying to be an expert on myself, and I hope to find a group of people who are trying to do the same!

To start, here is a little bit about myself… My name is Clara Wrene and I grew up in the Midwest. I wouldn’t say that my childhood was anything out of the ordinary, i wasn’t a child prodigy but I did alright in school. I chose to play violin rather than take on any sports, and I wasn’t “popular” by high school standards. In my junior year, we took a test to help us determine which career path we wanted to follow. It was one of those tests where you rate how much you like different jobs/hobbies and based on your answers, they (whoever they are) tell you what career path you might enjoy most. The results came back as a bunch of options in a big circle and there was a dot placed somewhere in that circle that indicated which path you lean towards. My dot came back square in the middle of the circle. I chose to take that as “OK at most things, not amazing at anything” which inevitably led me to the safe choice of Engineering.

Now i know several people who are engineers through and through. There is nothing wrong with that! But i am not one of them. I failed calculous 1-4 more times than i can count but somehow (with the help of many professors, deans, and family members) pushed my way through. I graduated and started working immediately for a small company that was run in a way that I loathed. One big bossy guy in the corner office watching over his minions and making sure his check got cut first…. you know the type. I was a Quality Engineer dealing mostly with suppliers and enforcing ISO rules like I wrote them myself. After about a year of working there, I had to start therapy because my mental health was on the decline….hard. I did the homework, got myself back to a manageable place and found a new job as soon as I could. I thought that would fix everything but come to find out all corporations are the same and I don’t care about making the big guy money, or how many damaged products got to customers this year.

My mental health began to decline again after my fiancé got a job in another city so I decided to take matters into my own hands. After months and months of meditating, self-help books, and feeling truly and utterly sorry for myself and my situation, I realized that I have been forcing myself down a path that I hated because I was told it was safe, would make me a lot of money, and put me on the “successful” path that everyone else is on. What a crock of sh*t that was.

That leads me to now, I am attempting to pick myself back up and I have vowed to quit leading myself down this path. I refuse for my identity to be my career any longer. I refuse to follow the herd. I refuse to let this be the next 40 years of my life. I deserve every bit of joy that this life can give me and so do you. My one hope for this blog is that it reaches someone who feels the same way and that we can inspire each other to take the leap.

Let’s start Thriving Like Wildfire together…