Is this change?

Again

You may be experiencing:

Overwhelm
Anxiety
Excitement
Fear
Boredom
Itchiness
Burn out
Joy
Acceptance, swiftly followed by rage
Indecision
Disconnect
Hyper-action
Annoyance

All the time, any time, today, for a year, since birth, after death- so why mention it? Because we just did this. We just ‘adapted’. We bought desks and converted our end tables. Upped our tech and learned to sleep in. Threw away uncomfortable heels and stopped packing lunches. The loathing we felt we came to embrace. I now own a weight set and am cool with not seeing my parents. Oh, yeah, and my cats are calmer.

Let us not forget the depression and budgeting. Eating, the weird, restricted, obtuse, and more easeful, too. I don’t feel any healthier nor is there much hope beyond the day-to-day work wins, and those cannot be underestimated, truly. If not for work, I don’t know. I just don’t know. Without that, the depression mentioned would have gone further and traveled fiercer; think “piglet escaped from her pen”, but this piggy breathes fire and farts atom bombs.

As much as I like to think there is NOT more to life than work, there is. I found this to be so, when the lights turned off on pedestrians’ assumptions and I narrowed my gaze onto my laptop. Thinking invoices and clients and services and schedules. This happened once before and was the case for a long, long time. When I started on the three-person crew that grew into the spunky startup shortly after the what-the-fuck-do-we-do after being hired phase, funding and customers began to ramp up, and then there was hiring and I became the ‘person/person’ who was off to training in career and executive counseling with the agreement that I would return, build the HR and Executive architecture, steer strategy in marketing and busines building. The founders being deep in tech and finance, everything outside of that was on me to do or hire for or risk fatally fucking up.

Loving a big leap, I leapt and did well (oh, yes) and too was eaten. Allowed myself to be dined upon by all the doing and checking and correcting and asking and trying and planning, and you know what – it was great. I was really, really, happy. Felt valued (I was), impactful (check), compensation was stellar, and community – awesome, but then… something happened. That is called expansion. Expansion means not duplicating, it means triplicating. It means the business that once felt like a thing that could be held in one’s mind and proverbial hand, transforms into a theory.

That, too, is the time when an ownership/executive team changes from a bunch of folx who do a thing well into entrepreneurs by trade. The job of an entrepreneur is not to lead a given business, but found and lead businesses. One may or may not want that, but prosperity cares not. We all got a bit, a lot a bit, flustered and balked, and chose to get out. There was interest in selling, we had a wonderful baby tiger with nails now too long to trim, we had done our part, the curtains were rustling, credits rolling – peace!

Change indeed. Less on sign off day, but that year before as we three secretly got the entity most ready and pretty to pass on, that is when I started to dial down. Midday yoga breaks, three- and four-day weekends, real vacations, and taking happy hours with coworkers. Easing back to what most might say are ‘normal’ working habits. As much as I learned to gun it in an earlier time, in this I lit up to the horizon of more of myself. The independence to my career experience and acceptance of the fear of the unknown in all that – another gift that allowed me to manage the freak out and maintain my compass when we DID sell and I … well I took on being the coach you know today.

Here we go again - flip flop from ease to effort gymnastic trail is newly on, and it so has done me very well, Business is good. My husband is out of work forever, likely, now but we are set. Thanks to my manic managing and obtuse effort. I can say this, I am proud of this, I navigated, I am safe, pathology well applied, but now now NOW that well may not work at all!

It is changing again and, unlike the sale of a business, this is NOT a thing I am controlling at all. Happy news is happening. Coming back is back. I can toss out many masks (soon) and that is great and that is really scary, because change, all change is hard. AND WE DID THE THING, we ‘adapted’ and I was really good at doing so. I don’t want it all to go. I don’t want to do all the things that seemed necessary and thoughtless nor hang with the friends that were absolute fucks in late 2020. There is a lot about Virtual life that suits me. And I am also a bit scared. A year can still feel like a whiplash, even a good one.

In discussing this experience, I am well aware the conversation is not one, not really. The above is madly one-sided, and that is a choice – I promise. Odd to talk in theory about your, dear readers, story or experience. Unethical maybe, no definitely unethical to do so, and therefore I don’t. The only person to exploit here is me, done so for a purpose – to present a maybe. Maybe there is something here you get? Perhaps you, too, flailed and now are flailing again, even as though things were supposed to be ‘great’ right now? Better, and why so miffed? 

Boredom as noxious as untethered dynamic digressions, both super-binary aspects of the broad human experience smashed together in one slice of one generation, and goddamn if that is not a kind of gaslighting, I don’t know what is.

This is change indeed, the thing we are to embrace and accept like we are to take medicine and not ‘overreact’, behave well with, and be nice to. Yeah, don’t. I am really inclined to, but am here to try not to. It is as easy as it familiar and more accessible than new – too much damn new! – but if there is take on that seems more accessible to take on – I think it might be honesty. That, earnestness is a thing this year has too granted, and excuse me for not citing that earlier. If anything is worth not burning, it is the unveiling of behavior, practices, motivations, beliefs and so I shall choose (for Lord knows we need control!) to take on that mantle in a mini way and say: I am wary.

Are you not sure and a bit sad? Getting flashbacks from early Shutdown? In emotion though that does seem to make a lot less sense than it did in the way-way back? Cool. That is change. This is a lot of it. What is ‘positive’ can be just a paralyzing as that which sucks.

Odd as it could be, though, if there is an internal freeze in you- so chilly am I. I am getting used to getting used to and it doesn’t look great. Honesty and care are the things that are NOT oscillating, so continue on that mask or no, six feet or closer, at home or on the subway, dining inside or out, puzzles or Jell-O shots – move and ‘opening up’ in kind, and no present rush.