If You Want Your Life to Change...
...you have to actually make different choices.
I don’t know if anyone noticed, but this newsletter went on a back burner for a few weeks as I simply had no time to write. An upcoming trip was cancelled so I am now returning to fill your inboxes with my stories and thoughts on changing your (my) life, dammit.
Above: Make a decision, already.
What do you do when a situation becomes untenable, when you’re certain it is no longer working for you and you must change it – but you’re not sure how? Or maybe you have an idea of how you might change it, but the choice to do so is risky. It would involve consciously rejecting certain values and beliefs you’ve held for all of your adult life. It might even involve depending on other people who have a track record of not being all that dependable.
Do you take the risk? Do you open yourself up to the possibility of failure (again)?
In February, I found myself in that ever-so-familiar place of treading water to stay afloat – of being yanked around by tasks and deadlines and uncompromising demands, struggling to keep up with what needed to be done. My son’s father was travelling for a five-week period and I was solo parenting full-time, which I haven’t done since the summer. Normally, this is not especially difficult for me; I’m one of eight children and I only have a single child, so it’s not challenging to maintain perspective on what hard looks like when it comes to raising kids.
But slowly and steadily, my time began to slip from my grasp. First, there was a sudden flurry of appointments, none of which could be cancelled for various time-sensitive reasons. There were meetings with the individual therapist, the couples’ therapist, the accountant, the financial advisor, the doctor, the hospital, the teacher, the tutor, and even the acupuncturist.
Next, a 110,000-word manuscript I was working on began swallowing up my focus as the anticipated light-medium copyedit turned into a heavy one involving far too many hours of document preparation instead. The minutes before appointments, early morning hours, evenings, and all the spaces in between tasks now went to staring at my laptop screen in frustration.
Finally, the weather stepped in to add insult to injury. My city bans parking when it snows, which means all cars have to be off the streets and tucked away in parking garages so the plows can do their job unimpeded. After spending 90 minutes relocating two of the cars I happened to be responsible for one Monday evening, I returned to find I could not pull the third car out of the driveway to take my son to an activity: a wall of ice blocked us in and it took another 90 minutes to chisel it away with a garden shovel.
Later that night, lying next to my son in his bed as he tried to fall asleep, I was unable to resist angrily typing out an e-mail response to my project manager on my phone. And when I snapped at my son to stop interrupting me so I could think, a thought that had been niggling away over the past year returned to the back of my mind: I can’t work like this anymore.
I’ve been chipping away at the problem of work since the summer, starting with trying out different ways to approach it. I tried de-prioritizing work overall, which is helpful to some extent but not entirely possible when deadlines are involved. I took longer breaks between lengthy manuscripts, giving myself more space to recover from their tendency to extinguish the rhythms of my daily life, smothering my free time and available attention like a blanket dropped over a flame.
I pushed myself to confront unreasonable expectations, to limited success. I thought long and hard about how I might fundamentally change my working relationship with this specific client, yet failed to come up with any long-term solutions.
Despite these efforts, I found myself being repeatedly consumed by what I think are unacceptably high expectations and demands for a manuscript in relation to pay. When one author’s requests clearly exceeded the scope of work for the project and the project manager nonetheless asked me to meet them, I knew it was time to consider letting this working relationship go altogether. Somewhere along the line, my role as a copyeditor/editor became one of producing a print-ready manuscript and that is not at all my interest.
But who am I to expect the indulgence, the luxury, of only working in ways that satisfy me? Don’t we all have to put up with things we dislike about our jobs? And how will I get by without this client?
More generally, when do I know that it’s okay to chose myself? When do my feelings matter more than the income my work generates?
These thoughts naturally invoked financial anxiety and the lessons from my young adulthood that said you never, ever say no to money or opportunity when you need it. And I clearly need it. This is the conditioning that caused me to take on multiple after-school jobs and attend university classes all summer long, to work 60 hours a week for all of my 30s, to get four degrees, and to burn out by the time I turned 40.
Yet if we want our lives to change, we have to consciously choose something different. So even though this was my largest client by far, even though a (very) favourable exchange rate further encouraged me to continue our working relationship, I had to consider letting them go.
“It seems like you’re always willing to suffer just a little more,” my therapist observed. “You know a situation isn’t working for you yet you continue to put up with it, to go past the boundaries you’ve set, because you expect it to eventually change. But then you find yourself suffering for far longer than you planned.”
And that is the story I no longer want to tell about my life. I don’t want that story to be one of an endless series of hardships, of persevering, of getting through in the hopes of arriving at something better. I want “something better” to be now. I want to stop suffering. I want the confidence to let go of what isn’t working for me in order to create space for what does.
Still, there’s a thin line between inspired and foolhardy. How do you know when you should take a leap and trust that the universe, some sort of benevolent life force, will catch you and set you on a good path . . . or when you’re making a stupid decision to leave your wellbeing in the hands of circumstance or people who shouldn’t be trusted?
Here, at least, I have an answer: I think there are times when you have to trust your gut. I think becoming aware of your instincts and learning to trust them is part of healing from the traumas that led you to ignore what you wanted or thought or felt in the first place. It’s part of challenging those old beliefs about needing to suffer, about your feelings not being as important as the logistics of your life. It’s part of re-prioritizing, re-ordering, re-working the values that have shaped your life.
About two weeks ago, I left for a trip to Barcelona. At my father’s funeral last fall, my mother mentioned that she wanted to travel with me. Normally, I would’ve declined. For the past 20 years, I’ve struggled to spend time around her for reasons that are too tiring to list (for reasons I’m tired of thinking about). But I’ve been wanting to break all of my old patterns and change my relationships, so I said yes on a whim. Something inside me told me the trip would be fine. Something told me I was different, I could handle it now.
Above: Basilica de la Sagrada Familia
Four days into that trip, I quietly ended my relationship with my client. My jaw had dropped as I’d walked through the doors of Sagrada Familia and was floored by the sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows, illuminating the interior with a kaleidoscope of colour. The vision, the imagery, the scale, and the cohesion of it all filled the space of this monolithic work of art, each element tumbling over the other to overwhelm you with grandeur. I struggle to find the words to describe it other than to say I’m so grateful to have experienced it.
It dared me. It dared me to live more bravely. It dared me to take risks, to defend my vision, to respect my own thoughts and emotions. It reminded me of the lessons of my undergraduate education, when I studied culture and art that told me to look for more, to ask for more, to engage more deeply with life. To admire what an untethered mind can achieve, to appreciate the human capacity to transcend what we might think is possible, to challenge and transform perspective.
I shared that moment with my mother, whose behaviour no longer irritated my insides into a whip-thin thread of annoyance. And I knew, instantly, that life is too short to be afraid of trusting a loving partner, to not give second chances, to grind out work in a situation that prevents you from being the parent or person you want to be. Life is too short to be caught, to be stuck, to suffer with an eye to “something better.”
Now is all there is. So be brave and reach for what you want, release what you don’t, and live come what may.
For more thoughts on travel and new perspectives, see:
This brought back dark memories of the last nine-to-five job that I had. Though I’ve been retired for nearly five years I still have bad dreams about the constant, daily struggle and stress of the impossible demands placed upon me by my supervisors. These dreams are accompanied by savage back pain that wakes me up long before the night is over. (I have an autoimmune condition that runs in my family, and it began to affect my health nearly forty years ago.) The story I like to tell is when we got a new general manager and he gave me a list of things to get done on day one. I finished all the jobs and proudly handed the list back with everything crossed off. The next day the list was twice as long. Congratulations to you for taking time away to travel to Spain, and for letting go of a client who was taking advantage of you. I was stuck in my last job for thirty years because I needed the healthcare. Thanks for sharing this piece about taking back a part of your life!