Endings as beginnings, but also as endings

This is one of the custom blogs I do for my Facebook friends. I asked if there was anything they wanted me to blog about, and I’m writing a post for Sarah because she answered.

Well recently I have come to a major “conclusion” in my life…an ending. I have had other friends who have gone through the same things recently and have taken 90 degree angles away from the ending. I think it’s an interesting topic, when one road ends which way to go, how to cope with a dramatic change, how to face a change you can’t change (like secondary infertility in my case) A break up, a job loss, graduation, you get the idea.

On man. This has been me all over lately. I felt very much like I was running up a down escalator towards the end of my old job. Every time I tried to enact some change in my life, I just spun my tires and didn’t get anywhere. I mean, I generated a lot of blog posts and I applied to probably hundreds of other jobs, but what did that earn me? A lot of sleeplessness, exhaustion, and a general inability to think straight.

I felt like a fly in a bottle, and I basically was. I wore myself out climbing the walls, trying to make the outcome I knew was happening not happen. I tried to make myself more portable. Maybe my furious job search action helped, but maybe not. And to be honest, at the end of that situation, I had a hard time seeing why I would ever want to work for someone else again. I started my consulting firm thinking I’d rather work like a dog for the rest of my life than ever have my financial future in someone else’s hands. Now I feel less passionate about the independence, but more interested in the possibilities owning my own business could open up for me.

So I guess that’s sort of a 90 degree change. From loyal corporate drone to lone wolf traveler. Although I have been self employed before, so it’s not that big of a leap.

But to what extent are these changes more of me trying to delay the inevitable: serious, irrevocable and unavoidable change? No one is safe from dashed expectations. When we lose something, we don’t just lose what we had, even if it’s only something we thought we had. We lose everything we ever put on the possibility of having. We think we’re going to get more time with loved ones, or we day dream about how life will be if/when things go our way. And then all of a sudden the yellow brick road we’d imagined stretched out in front of us is falling off into the ether of lost opportunity. So instead of staying the course, we veer left or right and we start our own business, we date the exact opposite of our ex or move 10,000 miles away. Because if I can’t be safe in the future I imagined, I don’t even want to inhabit anything remotely resembling the same space. We make the thing we wanted so big in our minds that we can’t imagine anything else. So we don’t. We change so many things that the one loss doesn’t seem so massive. And then we feel safe, because surely this completely different version of our future won’t let us down like the old one did.

It’s all fantasy. Eventually, we all move back to center, and bad things will happen to us. Massive sorrow will accompany any future we chose. And I don’t mean to say that as a negative thing, if that makes any sense at all.

Change, loss, sadness, these are just a part of life. People (myself included) waste so much energy and cause so much drama trying to avoid them. We apply for a hundred jobs we don’t really like, we stay too long, or we leave too soon, we get frantic trying to avoid things that can’t be avoided and in the process we miss out on why life is worth it even with the inevitable pain. We forget to cherish what we have here in this second, and this second and this one.

Maybe it’s good to get away from the place where your heart broke so you can forget how it got that way for a little bit. But life moves on. I mean, did any of us want exactly the things we eventually got? I certainly didn’t. I can definitely say that at no point in my career path did I envision a lay off. But I did always want my own business. So my house blew down. I found something I liked in the rubble and decided to build a new house with that. And when that house eventually blows down too, I’ll build another one.