(This is not exactly a cheerful post, skip it if you're not in the mood.)
It's funny to me how many people consider working to be "real" life and anything that doesn't include working as some other non-category. I had plenty to do before I went back to work, but for a variety of reasons I decided last year that a one-year job was exactly what I needed. It turned out to be the right decision, but it was always a one-year position. The end of it was included in the beginning.
So when people ask me, so what are you going to do now? As if that job was what I was really doing, and all the other stuff in my life was just filler, I don't know what to say. It's the job that was the temporary thing. Or at least that job was. It was never my ideal job, but it was the perfect job for what I needed at that moment. If that makes any sense.
Yesterday was my first day of not working that was a day I would have been working if I still had a job. Geeze, this is fairly convoluted today. I had this half-giddy, half-guilty feeling all day, like I was playing hooky or getting away with something. I am extraordinarily lucky to not have to have an income at the moment. I suppose that could change at any time, but at the moment I have that beginning-of-summer-vacation feeling and I am trying to enjoy it to the fullest, because I know in another six weeks or so, I will start to miss working. Not badly enough to start back again, but in six months, I might get there. We'll see.
So back to the disappointment idea. I guess I do have another thing to say. There are so many people our age who are living their dream. After years of hard work, they've reached a sweet spot in the career, made it to the top, or achieved their goals. Or they've started a new business or a new marriage, or they've dramatically changed course and found the career they always dreamed they would have. They're happy and successful and they're writing books about how awesome if is, and if they did it, you can, too.
But there's a more silent group of us out here who aren't there. We've worked hard, too. We've kept the home fires burning so a spouse could achieve their dream, or we've figured out that the dreams of our youth weren't what we wanted but were too busy raising kids and keeping it together to figure out a new dream. We aren't having the victorious experience that gets most of the press.
And there's a further group, a group whose dreams have collapsed through no fault of their own. The death of a spouse or child, or the long illness of a family member that drained every dime as fast as it could be earned. The mental illness or developmental delay of a child that required special schools and therapy and expensive medication. The older child or spouse that is an alcoholic and/or an addict, in and out of shelters and treatment centers and maybe even jail. The spouse that left, and left behind financial ruin.
It's not what you planned. It's not what you wanted. But it's what you've got. "I never thought this would happen," a friend told me after relating the latest round of shelters and treatment centers her almost 30-year-old child had been through. And she's not alone.
I don't even know what to say here except that the voices of these last two groups are as important as the successes. I've been poking around on blogs, and among my friends and loved ones, and these folks don't make a lot of noise. Most of us are old enough to know that all we can do is just move forward with what we've got. Nobody really wants to hear about the ways that people in their 50s and 60s are maybe not really doing OK. We're supposed to be on the home stretch, reaping the just rewards of our long and successful lives. But it doesn't always work quite the way we expected.
Some days I'd include myself in that middle group, but other days I feel so intensely lucky to be where I am that I can't possibly be anything but grateful. I don't have any advice here. I guess you just mourn what's not ever going to happen and keep going. We may not be young anymore, but there's always time to forge a different kind of life than what we had planned, a life that may not fit the traditional definition of success, but that works for where we find ourselves.
That's all. Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but I felt like it needed to be said.
1 comment:
Congrats on wrapping up your job! Sounds like it was the right thing at the right time. Any time I wander down the "What if I had done "X" instead of "Y" road..", I try to remember that if I were to have that "other" life... the one where I chose the different path in the woods, the one which would ALSO have "made all the difference", well... then I wouldn't have had the life that I've lived! And, I wouldn't want to trade out of the experiences that my choices have enabled me to have. The trade offs were worth it for me, even if they aren't easily categorized or explained to the outside world.
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