This is it! I am officially UNEMPLOYED! Yeah, baby! Free as a bird!
…
Actually, the whole thing was a little anti-climactic. I came in to work, just like any other day. I said “hi” to my coworkers. I answered some emails. I walked around and said my goodbyes, which was different, but didn’t feel all that different from any other day – it was just another conversation with my colleagues. I sent out my goodbye email and updated my OOO Outlook and voicemail messages, just as I would do any other time I would be out of the office. A few people who hadn’t heard about me leaving yet expressed surprise and inquired as to what had precipitated the change.
Then it was time for my exit interview. It wasn’t really an interview, so much, as it was HR checking the boxes that they had done everything legally required to sever me. I’m not sure what I expected to feel or how I thought I would feel, but, in the end, I just felt…I guess it was a mixture of happiness and impatience. I was going to write ambivalent, but that’s not the right word. I wasn’t ambivalent at all. I was ready to get out and move on – I had been for several weeks at this point – and this was just one more step in the process standing between me and my future.
There was an element of surreality to the whole thing. It was as if I was observing myself from the outside, like a disinterested third party. “Now Janet’s saying goodbye to her coworkers.” “Now Janet’s signing off that she received all the necessary paperwork.” “Now Janet’s turning over her computer and cell phone.” “Now Janet’s leaving the building for the last time.”
After they took my computer back, there wasn’t any reason to stick around, so my coworkers and I took off for one last team lunch. One last team lunch, and yet…to me, it felt like I was going to see them all again on Monday, like nothing had changed. I knew I would miss seeing them and commiserating with them about this and that, but I felt no sense of loss. I just felt eager to get on with things.
I guess that’s how it is, though, when you’re the one leaving. As long as you’re leaving for the right reasons. This isn’t the first time I’ve walked away from a situation that was no longer serving me. In those times, I have felt very different things depending upon why I was leaving and what I was leaving to do. One particular moment in my life stands out when I had to take a huge leap of faith – even bigger than the leap I’m taking now – and how free and blessed I felt in doing so, despite the objectively enormous amount of risk I was taking on. I never looked back and I never regretted my decision, even as my situation seemed to turn bleaker by the day. My sense of hope and lack of regret told me I’d made the right decision, no matter how difficult my situation may have seemed. In the end, everything worked out in my favor and in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
In another situation, my feelings were quite different. While I felt excitement at what lay ahead, I was resentful of the change rather than grateful for it. I was sad to leave friends behind, to uproot myself and start over in a new place. I didn’t want to change and did so only under extreme duress. The result this time was quite different – because I didn’t want the change (even though it was the change that I had chosen), I resisted it at every turn in both my professional and personal life. I found myself in a kind of stalemate, actively (if unconsciously) working against the change I said I wanted to see.
I am reminded of the story of Lot’s wife (she is apparently known as Edith in some traditions, so that’s what I’ll call her) in Genesis, in which she looks back on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and “is turned into a pillar of salt” as punishment. Before I go any further, just let me clarify that I do not take the words of the Bible literally. I do not believe in a man in the sky doling out punishments to those who do not live according to his will. I do, however, find great wisdom about how to find internal peace and happiness in the stories told there. In the case of Edith, we have a woman who was forced to flee her home in fear of her life and told not to look back. But she does look back (wouldn’t you?) at the destruction of her home and “is turned into a pillar of salt.”
What happened here? Did an angry, external deity impose a punishment on Edith for failing to abide by his will? For lamenting the loss of her home and her friends? The future marriages of her daughters? No. What happened is Edith didn’t want to accept the change that was happening in her life. She didn’t want to leave her home. She didn’t want to let go of the hopes and dreams and plans she had attached to the life she had established in Sodom. She held on to the past instead of embracing her future and, in doing so, her anger and resentment over her loss closed her eyes and her heart to the future that was hers to create. It ate away at her compassion, faith, and ability to love, figuratively turning her to stone. I don’t know why “salt” was chosen to describe what became of Edith, but her story is basically a euphemism for allowing fear, resentment and victimhood to harden one’s heart.
Most of us have never had to abandon our homes, our cities, our countries in fear of our lives, but we all know what it’s like to be pushed out of the nest, pushed out of our comfort zone, forced by external factors to make a change we never wanted to make in the first place. For you, maybe it was the death of a parent (or a sibling or child), divorce, being the victim of a crime, loss of a job, or lost innocence. And, when that happens, we all know that feeling of looking back on what we weren’t yet ready to give up or what we feel was stolen from us – perhaps in anger, in resentment, in fear, in bitterness, or in a sense of injustice. We may feel justified in feeling those things, but there’s no denying the toll that negativity takes on us – hardening our hearts, preventing us from letting go of what’s holding us back and seizing, or even just seeing, the new and exciting opportunities that lie within our grasp.
That was me. My heart was definitely hardened. I resented the change I had willingly chosen. I didn’t want to start over in a new place. I focused my attention on all the ways things were “wrong,” all the things that should have been different. Because I wasn’t open to the possibility of finding happiness in that new place, my fear of not belonging, not finding my niche, not being happy became self-fulfilling. I never did regret making that change, and I recognize that I had to go through all of that to come out the other side wiser and stronger, but I also recognize I wasted an opportunity by being bitter and closed instead of open and curious.
I experienced some of that in this transition, too. I was unhappy, but instead of taking my unhappiness as a sign that I was doing something wrong and needed to make a change, I blamed the objects of my frustration for my unhappiness. Once again, I was focusing on what I thought was wrong externally instead of on how to make it right internally. This made the last few weeks at my job contentious and difficult. In hindsight, I can say I waited way too long to leave. If I could have accepted the message the universe was sending me – that it was time to move on – instead of fighting reality, I would have left at least a month earlier than I did and spared myself and my colleagues the distress of these last few weeks.
I may have dragged my feet in accepting and making this very necessary change, but I did finally do it and I have no desire to look back. It all feels strangely normal, considering how objectively abnormal it is. This is just the thing that I’m doing right now. And I so appreciate those past experiences of resenting the change that I chose because it’s the contrast of the negativity and resentment I felt then against the carefreeness and openness and excitement I feel now that tells me this change is good, and that good things will come from it.
TL;DR: Big girls don’t cry because it’s over, or smile because it happened – they just get on with it already.
