Transitions

I am back at work…

And finally feel inspired enough to write another post.

Many people have asked, “How was your break?” and “How does it feel to be back?”

I have found myself giving different answers. Some of which feel like they touch on my truth while others feel more cordial like robotically responding “good” when the grocery store clerk asks how you are doing. 

This isn’t because I don’t want to answer or that I want to give anyone a false impression. Rather I think it is due to me myself not actually knowing what the answers to these questions are. I am still in process and I myself am seeking to understand.

I think a good place to start is to talk about transitions. We go through these all the time, on the daily. The transition from home to work and work to home. The transition from the weekday flow and routine to the weekend vibe. Transitioning into and out of social situations, conversations, events, parties, crisis, seasons, life phases, developmental milestones, and so on. Sometimes it’s multiple transitions all at the same time. Sometimes the transition is small and unnoticeable.  While other times its life shattering like the death of a loved one or transformational like landing your first big job in the field you spent years building a career in.

I have been through many big transitions in my life. The most notable ones usually revolving around school, work, living situations, family and relationships. Sometimes these things overlapped in very meaningful ways such as finishing my masters program and transitioning out of the longesting standing job I had ever had into my very first position in the mental health field. These big transitions also seem to have come with a compilation of very big life changing experiences. For example, two weeks after I started my first mental health job as an ASW (Associate Clinical Social Worker) I got a text message from my ex-boyfriend and very dear friend stating that he was on hospice. He had been diagnosed with colon cancer while we were dating five years prior, did treatment and surgery but unfortunately had the cancer come back aggressively in his lungs. 

That first month being at my new job was spent preparing for his death. I would do the hour drive every weekend to stay with him at his mother’s house, getting in every last minute that I could. 

Then he transitioned… and so did I.

I have been lightly familiar with the concept of the 7 year cycle for a while. I can’t remember from whom or where I very first heard of it but its basic premise is that every 7 years we go through some kind of major transformation or evolution if you will. I have to say that my life has definitely aligned with this theory. At the age of 14 I experienced what I have now come to understand was a spiritual awakening and major transition in my life out of the party scene and into the Chrisitian church. When I was 21 and freshly graduated from my private Christian University I transitioned again, this time out of the church and into a time of re-exploring myself and my spirituality. It is important to note that this was also the year that I met Blake, the boyfriend who later would die of cancer just two months before my 28th birthday. It was during my 28th year that I went through a variety of major life stressors that ultimately led to my first experience of severe burnout. A journey I needed to go through again recently due to not having learned and implemented the lessons I needed to gain from the first one. 

So what the hell does all of this mean, and what does it have to do with this current transition that I am in?

What I have come to discover in the last few years of being a psychotherapist and a mother is that the most important process we must allow ourselves to go through is grieving. I don’t mean this just in reference to death but rather to every loss, change, transition, and transformation we experience. Actually without grief we don’t have the capacity to go through the transformational process to heal and evolve.

I plan to elaborate on this topic more in future posts, for today I want to discuss it only within the context of transitions.

The past three months being on stress leave gave me the opportunity to do a lot of things I simply just did not have the time to do while working. The two biggest things were traveling and spending time by myself. These are arterial veins to my feeling alive and connected with myself, others, and this world. Getting to do these things in abundance was such a blessing and it also came with lots of transitions, including unwanted and unexpected ones. From these abrupt transitions I have come to begin using this two word phrase, pivot and adapt. When your perfectly well laid out plan goes awry you can either force your way through and only increase distress or you can take the blow, allowing it to shift your course and begin adapting to the new outcome. There is a third word, however, that needs to be added in the between moment and that word is Grieve.

Pivot. Grieve. Adapt.

The thing about a transition is that there is something that is being lost in the process. Something that we had in the former situation, state of being, relationship, job, expectation, that we no longer have as we move out of and then into the something new.

There is a period in which we are called to grieve these losses, allowing the waves of emotion that come with mourning a loss to pass through us. To feel sad about the canceled trip to see a friend, angry that it wasn’t my choice to change it, questioning of what could have been done differently, and accepting that the deck was dealt as it was. Sometimes this process is quick and easy. Other times it can feel soul crushing.

I have this very vivid, emotionally heavy memory of when I was in 7th or 8th grade and I was going with my mom to my older brother’s homecoming court event. I was so excited to go and had been looking forward to it for days. I can’t recall the details of that day but things had not gone as planned and we ended up being so late that we only caught the last few minutes.

I was devastated.

I was so disturbed by the fact that we had missed the event and that there was absolutely nothing that could be done to change that fact. I couldn’t go back in time, it couldn’t be recreated or made up in any way. The moment had been lost, forever.

I held onto that grief for a long time, not knowing what to do with it or what any of it meant. I later learned that what I struggled with the most was the creation of an expectation that had failed to be met. So instead of learning how to grieve I learned how to stop creating expectations that were not 100% certain to come to fruition. Which is basically an impossible feat as anyone who has attempted to do this can attest to.

So here is my truth…

I am in transition.

I am grieving. 

I actually think that much of what my stress leave was about was the need to grieve expectations that I had created and held in my mind going into my current job. To continue grieving the loss of my phantasy family and the expectations that I was still holding around motherhood and raising my child with a partner. To let myself acknowledge how little I have grieved the death of my cousin who passed unexpectedly this past December.

It is all a lot to process and in the mix and muddle of it all one thing is very clear to me… that I am not the same woman I was three months ago. So I must also grieve the loss of her.

I am grieving the loss of all the free time and flexibility I had while on leave.

I am grieving the death of my savior complex.

I am grieving the final remnants of my self-destructive self as I transition into a life centered on self-care (more to come regarding this topic!)

I am pivoting. I am grieving. I am adapting.

So how does it feel to be back?

It feels like a lot.

It feels like home.

It feels like I have a long way to go.