On Second Acts and Second Chances

Recently -- this past August -- I changed jobs.

God, I was so optimistic.  This was the thing that would take me to the next phase of my career.  The next level.  It was going to be great.

It was going to be My Second Act.

Except that it wasn't.  It didn't work for me or for my family.  The people at the new job were nice, but it just didn't fit for me, for my family.  Maybe I didn't fit.

I knew pretty quickly that I had made a mistake.

We all, my family, were miserable.

You might say, "Surely, you should have given it more time, Working Mom."

Some might say that, yes.

But I will tell you something about being fifty-two years old:

Somewhere around age 50, you receive the gift of clarity.  (Well, I did anyway.)  More time would have been more misery . . . and, indeed, it was more misery, months more while I figured things out and allowed processes to do their thing.

But I was literally depressed as I watched things fall apart.

My Second Act was not so much an act, but an intermission.

Still, I knew that this was a terrible mistake.

Giving it more time would not have made it better.

So I called my old boss, and I told him that I'd made a mistake.

Actually, no, first I called two of my old co-workers, friends, and I told them that I'd made a mistake.  And I sobbed and sobbed.  Real regret.  I asked them if they thought that my old boss would take me back.  They said, "Yes," and encouraged me to call.

And THEN I called . . . and I got good news.  After jumping through a lot of hoops, I could come back.

My Second Chance.

I still beat myself up about having, as I thought at the time, done this thing to my family and my co-workers at my old (soon to be new) job . . . and at the new job, soon to be old, too.

But . . . .

One of my work friends, from the job I left and have now returned to, told me that I shouldn't feel foolish because I had learned something from this and that is valuable.  She's right.

When I told my sister-in-law what my work friend had said, she added, "She's not wrong.  Even at this age, if we aren't failing at things, it means we've stopped learning."

Another of my work friends said not to feel foolish because it's not like I'd left my son and husband to join a biker gang.  I told her that, while that was true, I sometimes felt like I had done the professional equivalent of that.

Not that the firm I joined, ever so briefly, was anything like a biker gang, not even close. There were a lot of really nice people there.  But the disruption that it caused in my family and my professional life felt like a similar sort of existential violence.

I did feel foolish, despite the words of my wonderful friends and sister (in law).

But I have come to see that, they're all right.

Growing, learning, and not having done the WORST thing to my family and my career . . . it's been a valuable lesson . . . a series of valuable lessons.

As midlife crises go, this one was pretty gentle, really.  (Because I will live to be 104, obvs.)

And ultimately, I have emerged with gratitude and a better appreciation for what I need versus what I want.  And so . . . .

My Second Chance, as it turns out, is My Second Act.

The COVID-Telework Diary: Day 36, Beginning of Week 6, in which I contemplate a thing that I did.

I put a color conditioner through my hair this weekend, which dyed the lighter parts of my hair a lovely, pale blue.

I truly, honestly love it.  I may just always have blue streaks, now that I've done it.  I plan to run the rinse through my hair again tonight to try to darken up the streaks a little bit.  Because why not?

I am, of course, not the only person doing things to their hair during this COVID-19 social distancing period.  Enough people are doing it that others are writing article about it.  And this quote from an article in Allure struck me:

"Hyperfocusing on the physical can be an attempt to escape the emotional; and in the midst of a global pandemic, everyone is experiencing new, sometimes scary emotions (fear, sadness, existential dread) in new, sometimes scary ways (home, alone, with no diversions)."

Even though I do sincerely like how my hair looks with the blue streaks, I think a little bit of escape is going on here for me too.  I think that putting a blue rinse through my hair and getting instant blue highlights is also helping me work through my anxiety.

I've had anxiety all my adult life -- probably all of my life, really. I've mostly dealt with it without medications, though there was a period early-ish in my career in which I had a couple of prescriptions to help me get through the day. Changing jobs eventually made the medications unnecessary, but there were many days early in my career when I would need to place a half a Xanax under my tongue just to calm down enough to be able to work.

Anxiety steals your focus and confuses your thinking.  It makes monsters and creates invisible enemies. It turns your psychological distress into a perceived physical threat.  You really do feel fight-or-flight, but it's your own thoughts that you need to fight or flee, so you feel trapped, causing you more distress. It's an ugly condition. And it's not simply enough to tell yourself to calm down when you're in the midst of an anxiety attack. You have to figure out how to break the cycle. Xanax can do that chemically.  But when you're not taking medication, you need other ways.

For me, anxiety is a lot about control, or the lack of it. The less in control I feel, the more anxious I can become, and the faster I can slip into a cycle of anxious dread and full on anxiety attacks.

For the past more-than-a-decade, since I changed my career focus (if not subject matter), I've dealt with my anxiety with lifestyle type stuff:  exercise, rigorous scheduling and planning, lists, meditation, the dog, magnesium, Disneyland (for real), wine, chocolate, mint tea, making sure I get enough sleep, setting and enforcing clear boundaries between work and home and self . . . .

That last one, the boundaries, has really been difficult to do during this quarantine time.  It's important to do, but with work and home and recreation all being in the same place, the lines are difficult to draw and maintain.

So I think that, this weekend, I drew them in my hair.

The blue:  It makes me feel lighter.  It makes me happy.  I like the way I look.  Importantly:  This is a thing I can control absolutely.  And feeling that certainty, feeling the control, is calming.  In a world where there is so little I can control right now, and in which there is so much to fear, having a little bit of control, however frivolous, is important.

And so, it's not just that blue is traditionally a color associated with calm and so my blue hair calms me. This blue is part fashion and part meditation. It is my certainty and my control. And, being that, it delivers to me inner peace.

Have a good week, friends.