Original post – August 15, 2020

On July 18, I turned 56. It’s not a landmark birthday in most people’s books but it was and is for me. I didn’t realize that until a week or two prior. My father committed suicide out of the blue when he was 56.Turning 56 caused me to reflect on his life and look at mine. It’s interesting looking back on his death from where I am now. It was completely unexpected and unbelievably traumatic. I was 29 years old. I thought he was old-ish when he died. He was prematurely white haired and he was my dad so therefore, old. What I know now is that he wasn’t old and that there’s so much life left past 56. I’m realizing that I’ve had more than one mid life crisis if a mid life crisis is defined by rethinking life choices. One of those is right now. Where am I now? Where do I want to be? Is this how I want to spend the next season of my life? The answer today is absolutely not. This blog is a start. It’s a step to potentially something different – something that I am passionate about. But I want to go back. There’s so much I’d like to share with my younger self with the experience that I’ve acquired along the way. I am not the person I was, not by a long shot. And thank God. Getting to this place has been painful, challenging, and difficult. It didn’t have to be that way. 

As you can imagine, losing my father was life changing. I knew it would be and I feared what those changes might be. I was married at the time and I now know that his death was the beginning of the end of my marriage, although it took a few years. I’m not going to go into all the details of the destruction of that relationship out of respect for the privacy of my ex-husband but what I can say is that it was horrible and so unnecessary the way it went down. Divorce is not a picnic in the best of circumstances but when I look back at my behavior and my choices, it could have been so different. But in order to understand that, I need to go back even further. 

I had no identity, no backbone, and no skills or tools regarding relationships when I was a young woman. I didn’t have a clue who I was or what I wanted. I had been raised to be chosen – not to do the choosing in a life partner. I was taught to be agreeable, to go along with, to not make waves. I didn’t think to myself “what would an ideal husband for me be like? What kind of life do I want with my partner?” As a result, I didn’t end up with a good match for me but I didn’t know that then. As we dated, there were things that came up that were obvious red flags. My MO was to talk myself out of those thoughts, to minimize, to overlook, and to think it would change. News flash, it didn’t. Had I been able to honor my gut and pay attention, that relationship would have ended as nearly as it began. It wasn’t big things though and that’s part of what made it easy to discount. For example, he was chronically late. I remember clearly one occasion. We were to meet at his house after work. This was pre-cell phone days. I arrived and he wasn’t there. No problem. Traffic. Ten minutes became twenty which became forty which became an hour and a half. During that time, I had a slow burn fume. Whether or not it was true, what I told myself was he was disrespecting me – that his time was more valuable than mine, that kind of thing. But I quickly shut down those thoughts by reminding myself of all the good stuff and telling myself not to be so picky. I was lucky to be with him – chosen. While that’s a very minor thing, it was a huge thing. I was not able to acknowledge how I felt in a real way and it would have been impossible to voice that. How easy would it have been to say “when you are late, I make up a story that you don’t respect me or my time.” He would have had the opportunity to correct that assumption or not. Either way, we would have known one another better and could have potentially made different choices. I’m quite sure we would have fizzled but we both had the same ineptitude regarding speaking our truth and were both conflict avoidant. So we moved forward. That little example was the story of the marriage. It happened in different ways over and over again. As my perspective changed with my own maturing and my dad’s death, it became clearer to me what I wanted out of life and what I didn’t. I found myself at a crossroads. By now, I had a one year old and I wanted to die. I remember very clearly standing on the deck on a beautiful sunny day weighing my options. I couldn’t kill myself because my sisters and I made an agreement that we’d never do that. I couldn’t get a divorce because I made a commitment and didn’t believe in that, per se. But I knew with everything I had that I could not do THIS for the next 50 years. Now let me be clear. I 100% own my choices. Had I been able to be in touch with my feelings and had the courage to have difficult conversations, I could have left my marriage with my dignity intact, but that’s not what happened. What ensued was many years of self destruction and struggle but eventually I emerged as the proverbial Phoenix.

Here’s what I know now. Life is fucking short. I am 100% responsible for my own happiness. My life hasn’t been anything close to what I imagined. So what. I was so invested in getting married, having a family, and living happily ever after that I didn’t know when to call it a day. I fought for the life I thought I wanted but wasn’t real and destroyed myself in the process. What I thought was so important at the time just wasn’t. Yes, I’d made what I thought was a lifetime commitment but I didn’t sign up for a lifetime of misery and I don’t think anyone would wish that upon me just to honor that commitment. It’s clear as day now looking at it through the lenses of 20 years of life experience but then, it was a quagmire that I couldn’t get out of. I wish I’d had the courage to leave my marriage but I didn’t. That was a decision I was incapable of making. He left me and I don’t blame him for that. It was long past due. What I would tell my younger self is that you do know the truth. You can trust yourself. You can have hard conversations. You can course correct when things aren’t how you’d like them to be. You are in charge of creating the life you want and you’re more than capable of doing so. 

So what now? I find myself at another crossroads. I am at another “I can’t do this for the next thirty years” realization. My identity that I hung my hat on for so long is gone. I’m not a single mother anymore. My daughter is an adult. She lives in Texas. My sisters live elsewhere – one out of state and one out of town. My parents are gone. My job is not just unfulfilling but it’s tearing me down. It’s time for change. It’s time to walk the walk with all that I’ve learned. It’s great to “know” these things but it’s time to figure out how to move forward and create a new life. I’m 56. There’s so much life left. It’s time to be brave. It’s time to be courageous. I’ve never found really satisfying fulfillment, joy, or LIFE by doing the safe thing. The safe thing to do is to stay at my job and chastise myself for wanting more. It’s staying in my lane. But that choice is also devoid of a rich, full life. It’s time for me to stop feeling so small and insignificant and let my light shine. It’s super scary to expose myself in this way but it’s absolutely taking me closer to the life that I want and the person that I want to be. I want to be my best self, at all times. That means I show up with all that I am. I am scared. I am broken. I am hurt. I have suffered. But I am also kind, loving, smart, funny, compassionate, generous, wise, healing, and dare I say, brave. I hope we all can go after what we need and want. Leave that toxic job. End that bad marriage. If you’re broken, own it and heal from it. Life is to be lived, not endured. Happiness has to come first. We need to put our oxygen mask on before we can be of any use to others. We get ONE life. How are you going to spend it? I choose joy. (it’s just gonna take a lot of effort, it’s scary, but I’m gonna try)