CH CH CH CHANGES!

It seems that 2010 is the year that kicked my ass as well as the year that has changed everything for me.  I have changed my marital status, my address, my commute to work (twice – but more on that later) and my perspective.   There was a point at the start of all of the changes that I wanted it all to stop and change back to the way it used to be but I have learned that there is no stopping the tide of change.  As they say, you either roll with the change or it will roll over you. 

So change I did – on many fronts but the most exciting and current is my job change.  Earlier this year, the work girls and I had sat around and said what were the industries that we had not worked in that we would like to try for our next job.  I said banking – for really no particular reason other than it always seemed interesting to me.  Also, because in my city, the major banks head offices are all in the heart of the city and I was in a job whose head office was located deep in suburbia.  I am at my heart a city girl not meant to live in the suburbs.  We finish our lunch and I never gave our conversation another thought. 

Fast forward to June and a friend who is looking for a job is on a job site and sees a posting for a position she thinks is tailor-made for me.  She calls me to see if I am interested and my stock answer is I am always interested – then she sends me the posting and lo and behold it is for a position with a bank.  So I give my resume a little spit and polish, whip up a cover letter and send it off.  I fully expected this to be a ‘gotta do our due diligence and post this but we have a great internal candidate’ position and lo and behold the bank’s HR department called me.  We have the standard HR chat and then I do not hear from them for almost 3 weeks.  I am now convinced that they just had to go through the motions and have given the job to an internal candidate.  Then one day – WHAM – they called and we scheduled a face-to-face with the person to whom I would be reporting if I got the job as well as HR.  I go and it is a good conversation and I feel very positive about it, send my thank you note and wait to hear from them.  2 more weeks go by and nothing…At this point, I have a full plate of stuff from my current job and am not really worried about it but just want to get it over with one way or the other.  Then I get the call for the 3^rd interview – and this one would be with the department VP as well as the person who had the position before me.  And this interview is….different.  I cannot get a read on whether I am giving the right answers, wrong answers, have pissed them off or impressed them.  For the 2^nd time in my life I walk out of an interview and have no idea if I got the job or not.  I go home, pour myself a large glass of wine and play trucks with my nephew.  I was supposed to hear by the end of the week and hear nothing – am convinced that I do not have the job.  Large quantities of wine are consumed again.

4pm on a Monday afternoon and my cell phone rings – it is the bank calling and wanting to book an appointment to discuss my meetings.  Now is good for me I tell them – convinced that they had called the winning candidate already and were just getting around to those who did not get the job.  We discuss my interview and then they tell me that lo and behold the job is mine.  NO EFFING WAY is what I want to yell but manage to keep my composure.  I do however, almost fall off of the chair but again, manage to keep my ass on the chair – but just barely. 

We chat, discuss the offer and other details and they send me a package of info for me to read and use a resource to make my decision.  4 days later, in the midst of packing up my old life at my old house and with a brown dog’s head in my lap, I call the bank and accept their offer.  3 weeks later I started at my new job – at a bank.   And if all that wasn’t good enough – after I gave my resignation serendipity kicked in and revealed to me that this was the right decision for me to make and I didn’t have to wait 1, 5 or 10 years to learn that I made the right decision.  So here I am, at my new job, with new colleagues and a new commute and am very happy with my decision.  I am so glad that I decided to roll with the change and see where I ended up.  And this time, I ended up exactly where I should be.  Yay for me!

TODAY

Getting divorced is a very weird thing.  In the beginning you never think you will feel normal again and you feel as if you are living in some weird bubble state where everything you love is being held just out of your reach.  You feel so disconnected from what was your life and all that you held dear and the only thing this feels real is the overwhelming, crushing sadness and fear that blanket you each and every day. 

After a while, you get some distance and you start to feel your way back to you – almost like your nerves regenerating after a serious injury.  You go about your business every day, going through the motions yet it in many ways, you feel like a you need to re-learn everything about your life again.  You need to relearn how to go about your life as a me not a we.  It all feels so odd but you feel good because you can see your progress and anything feels better than the blanket of sadness you were wearing.

At some point, you realize that you will be OK.  You have moved forward enough that the paperwork that you have to do to end your marriage doesn’t scare you anymore so you do it.  You know that you have to make big decisions about your life, on your own but you know that you can and you will.  You know that you need to get out and meet new people and expand your circle of friends so you make steps to do that.  And finally you realize that you liked being married, part of a we and that you were good at it and want that again so you prepare yourself for the next phase of your life – single and dating. 

But then, as you realize that the day is coming closer when the legalities will be all done and all that you cherished is no longer within your grasp – you have this overwhelming feeling of melancholy hit you and it takes your breath away because you thought you were past this.  You thought you have moved on enough that maybe, just maybe you had moved past those feelings and had moved into the new me part of your life and all would be shiny, new and happy.  All you can think at this point is "Damn, I thought I was past this".

But I realized today that all of those feelings coexist together – happy and sad, excited and scared – and it is OK.  Maybe the only way to get through this is when I wake up say to myself – “Today I feel….” and just accept that it is OK to be sad or lonely or depressed or happy or excited or scared or any combination of those or different emotions on any given day as long as I don’t let myself wallow in sadness or cover up a part of me under a blanket of fake happiness.  So today I am sad that my marriage is ending and that I will never again be Wilson’s wife and that we will not grow old together as I had dreamed.  This is how I feel today…tomorrow, who knows.    And in someway, accepting this has made it easier.   And today, I will take anything that makes this journey easier.