Welcome back to the back-story! This is part two of the tale explaining why and how I started this business coaching solopreneurs on project management and productivity.
Last issue I wrote about how a life-altering insight in 2007 did not actually alter my life much at all, at first. When I woke up that morning and realized that I was profoundly unhappy with my life and that my unhappiness was self-inflicted in a lot of ways, I knew that I needed to change up a lot of things.
But I didn’t. Not at first. That realization itself was actually just the first crack in my armor.
There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in. ~ Leonard Cohen
I had shrouded myself in a heavy protective layer of cynicism and bitterness since my parents both died when I was in my mid-20s and I lost almost everything, including our house and their dogs (it was a whole thing). By 2007 it had been just over ten years since that tragedy engulfed me, and I had spent most of that decade drifting. I knew that I was not very happy, but I figured not being steeped in misery and despair was as good as I could ask for. To be fair to my younger self, I think that was true for a few years, because I was not in a state of recovery but rather in a state of ongoing crisis. I was fighting for any sense of security I could cling to while I fought to survive.
In a full life of “critical moments,” that depressing insight of 2007 is the one that defines my before and after, but it did not spur me to immediate action. It was simply the sound of incoming change, the start of me becoming aware of the fact that I needed to change.
It took a lot more cracks before the light got inside and I managed to actually make some changes. The biggest crack happened in April of 2008 when my psyche utterly rebelled against my inertia and drove me into a complete emotional breakdown. It was more like a critical failure of a major support beam: I literally collapsed on the floor in tears. I will always give props where they are due to my ex-husband, because Mike managed to keep everything together while I laid in that same old too-small mattress and cried (read: sobbed) for three days straight.
Speaking of my husband…while my marriage to Mike lasted through 2010, we had been going in different directions for years. Acknowledging it was hard, but I understood for the first time in my life that I could either take charge of the situation or be run over by it.
To be honest we should have divorced in 2005 when I first moved to Tallahassee. In a fit of selfish hubris mixed with fear of abandonment, I used emotional blackmail to force Mike to leave behind the city he loved (Orlando) in order to follow me to a small town he did not like in order to appease me. It was not fair to either one of us and is something I will always regret. In retrospect I see that it was my attempt to cling to some sense of “normalcy,” and while I sympathize with my past self, it was definitely a case of making things worse instead of better.
At the time of my Big Breakdown in April, 2008, I was a temp worker at a terrible office job with a failing manufacturing business (like my marriage, it would be shut down by 2010). My entire life was nothing more than getting out of bed to go to that job to earn a too-small paycheck to buy groceries and juggle the bills. Occasionally we’d go to the movies, if we could scrape together the costs. My husband was obsessed with computer games and going out drinking at the local nightclub. I didn’t even have that much I cared about.
But first came the self-awareness and then came the Big Breakdown, and only then could the light start filtering through everywhere, into every part of my life and psyche. The turning point had arrived: give up entirely and let the light dim until I was a broken husk of a human being, or feed the energy in order to break out of the dreary mold I had trapped myself inside.
The divorce was perhaps the most visible, public change I eventually created but it was only a part of a much larger upheaval in my life. The light had come through the cracks and the whole edifice was crumbling. It was as terrifying as I thought it would be, but the results were also far greater than I could have imagined.
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail! ~ Benjamin Franklin
Post-breakdown, I was finally at the point where I started looking for help. This was a fantastic plan, but in practice it did not go smoothly.
I found a therapy practice specializing in grief issues and which had a sliding-scale payment policy, but the first time I called, I hung up on the receptionist. The second time I called, I hung up on the receptionist. The third time I called, I broke down crying on the receptionist.
(Oh that poor, poor receptionist…)
I don’t know why asking for help is so hard in those situations when we most need the help, but it was a massive hurdle. Yet I would not stop calling until I made that appointment, because I understood the what was on the line: me.
It was scary, though. I knew that starting down that path would mean that my life would become unrecognizable in ways I could not predict. I knew that I had a lot of hard decisions ahead of me…or rather, a lot of hard questions to ask with no easy answers. There were so many unknowns in the mix, with no guarantees as to what I would need to do or what would happen. Would my marriage survive? Would I have to move? Would I need to go on meds for my depression and anxiety? Would I decide that my life was pointless and I was a failure? What was I going to do next?????
Step one was acknowledging what my psyche was telling me: it was time to get help and face the fallout of the previous fifteen years of my life.
Step two was…what?
Continue to Part 3
OR
catch up on Part 1!
This is the second part of my story, which I’m sharing in this newsletter over several updates. Next week we get to the big action montage!