Waking Up

​I’ve just spent some time reading what I have written on this blog since I started it in the summer of 2016. Luckily for me, I haven’t written that much, so it didn’t take me too long to go through everything. But it was an interesting retrospective on what I have been through the past three years. It has taken me three years to get me to where I am today. Well, technically it’s taken me 32.5 years, with an extra emphasis on the conscious work; life circumstances and my reaction to them, over the past three years to get me to where I am today, but you know what I mean.

So where exactly am I? Maybe a better question is when am I? Or who am I right now? That’s it. Who am I right now, and how does that inform where (and when) I am?

I am forty-six years old, and for the first time in my life, I can say with utter confidence that I am happy with who I am and what I am doing. I have finally landed a job working for an organization that “...builds power at the state and local level to change public policy, galvanize public support, and normalize women’s decisions about abortion and contraception.” That quote is taken directly from the website of the organization that I work for. To quote Elle Woods’s commencement speech at the end of Legally Blonde, “We did it!” Or rather, “I did it!” I did it. I finally landed a freakin’ job at a freakin’ place that works on the daily to advance reproductive healthcare, rights and justice. Finally!
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In August of 2016, I wrote my first blog post, and it was all about how unhappy I was. Try as I might to meditate, exercise, pray or gratitude my way to happiness, I just couldn’t do it. I came to the conclusion that I had to actually feel my feelings instead of eat them, cover them, ignore them or stuff them down. It’s taken me three years of feeling, but then suppressing again; followed by more feeling; followed by way too much feeling; followed by breaking, just a little... just enough; followed my more feeling and analyzing; followed by reaching some conclusions and taking some actions informed by those conclusions, and boom! Job at a repro organization.

Of course, it’s not as simple as it sounds, but at the same time; it is. It is that simple – it just took three years of my life. Twenty-plus years of experience and three years of intense emotional introspection, and I’ve landed exactly where I feel I should have landed 22 years ago.

But this is not about self-deprecation. I am done punishing myself for what I did and did not do; what I should and should not have done.

I am waking up. Waking up from the depression I have been in from trying desperately to fit into a world I never belonged in and from living my life in a way that works for other people, and then feeling miserable and broken because it didn’t work for me or make me happy, and then sabotaging myself in every way possible so I became dependent on that world for both my survival and self-worth, which caused me to only spiral further downward.  

I am waking up. While I’m waking up from the self-imposed slumber I have been in for over twenty years, I am also waking up to the realization of my own strengths, achievements, experience, skills and power. I have written a number of times in my posts about how I have hated being an Executive Assistant. The truth is, I am still an Executive Assistant. My current title is “Senior Executive Assistant and Special Projects Manager”. I still stare at an Outlook calendar for far too many hours a day, and there are still a number of daily tasks I have to pep-talk and self-reward my way through: “Okay, if you just {send this e-mail; make that phone call; do that research on that board portal; etc.}, then you can get up and go to the kitchen and get that third cookie you’ve been thinking about. But you don’t get the cookie until you do that task, okay?” I still emotionally eat and make horrific dietary choices daily. I am still 70 pounds overweight. I am still in debt, although not nearly in as much debt as I was last year, but I also make half the salary I used to make, so it still makes finances and daily living a struggle. I still don’t exercise regularly, and I am often in pain. Because of all of these things and more, I still tend toward self-deprecation; self-judgement, fear and doubt. BUT, I am able to stop myself quicker and more often from spiraling downward into paralysis, and I am able to keep moving myself forward.

That is the biggest change for me after starting this job. Even though I still need to break old habits and learn new behaviors and unlearn old ones, because I am happy with where I work and whom I work for and with, and what we are working toward, I have enough emotional capacity left at the end of the day to keep looking and moving forward, instead of regretting and lamenting everything behind me. I don’t expend so much energy every day just trying to exist in a space that sucks the life out of me, so I have it left over to engage with my spouse and think of our future together, and have conversations that help move us forward as a couple and as individuals. I can have fun and laugh. I can appreciate that all of the work I’ve done over the past twenty years, while exhausting and sometimes demoralizing, has given me amazing experiences and skills that I can now use in a space I value and love, and I would not have had any of that twenty-five years ago had I landed there when I wish I had. I can appreciate things and be grateful because I am happy, instead of trying to appreciate and be grateful for things I was incapable of  appreciating and being grateful for to try to become happy. I can look back now with certainty that I did not belong where I was trying to belong. I was not on the right path – I was moving further and further away from where I wanted to be and where I belonged, and I was in an incredible amount of emotional pain because of that wayward journey I took for so long.

But now I am waking up – refreshed and renewed. My commute is ridiculously long, and I still have to psych myself up on some Mondays or after a three-day weekend to get out of bed; out of the house; on the train and into work, but that’s me. If I could do it all again knowing what I know now, I would probably have pursued a career as a writer, so that going to work meant going to a room in my own house where my dog could curl at my feet, and I could write at my desk and have minimal contact with people, but I didn’t know any of that about myself twenty-plus years ago. I didn’t even like dogs back then! (What kind of monster was I?)

But I am waking up. Waking up to my potential. Waking up to the power of my life’s experience and how much stronger I am today because of it. Waking up to less fear and more action.
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I am waking up, and it is exhilarating.