Retreats, Careers and the Feelings In-Between

2011 is getting a hard, forceful slap goodbye. 

I sat here trying to find the most eloquent way to describe what has happened in the last two days and realized there is no way better than to state the facts as they are.  I quit my job and am going on a personal healing retreat.  Ok, so it’s not as “Eat, Pray, Love” as it sounds, but it’s close. 

This year was extremely challenging for me, both personally and professionally.  Having come full circle by December 30^th feels fantastic and I am determined to begin 2012 with my heart and my head in the exact right place. 

About two months ago, when things were feeling extremely uneasy at the shelter, an opportunity came across my desk to apply for a position with a different non-profit.  Turns out, the position was a perfect fit and starting January 23, I will be a Director at one of the largest homeless youth organizations in the country.  Resigning today was one of the more difficult things I have done this year, as my heart is very much wrapped up in the “funky little beach house” that is my homeless and runaway youth shelter.  Leaving 1736 is one of the most difficult decisions I have had to make in a long time.  I adore my staff and every single kid that has come across my path in the last 2.5 years.  However, just as my evening Residential Care Manager said to me today, I am ready for something bigger and the amount of lives that I have the opportunity to impact are infinite.   I am very much looking forward to this adventure and am excited to bridge a new and stronger relationship between my current shelter and the three shelters I will be managing in the future. 

On the personal side of life, I am leaving Sunday to literally disappear off the radar for the first week of 2012.  I have taken 9 days off from work, which I had planned to spend with some of my family. When those plans fell through, I decided to look into a suggestion that my clinical supervisor at work recommended.  I will spend the first 6 days of the year in Big Sur, CA at the Esalen Institute attending a personal growth workshop called “Awakening the Heart”.  From what I have been told, Esalen is an “absolutely magical place”.  It is a “retreat center for adults who are looking to transform their life”.  Am I expecting complete transformation? No.  But I am expecting 6 days of learning a bit more about myself and a place that will offer enough air to let me fully breathe in everything that is about to change in my life. 

And those two items are just the beginning of it.  There are numerous other things on the horizon including the possibility of a new relationship to 3 new classes that I need to choose from for my graduate school.  2011 will go down in my history as a year that will not soon be forgotten.  I am grateful that it brought me everything from hysterical laughter to suffocation in my own tears – as well as every single thing in between.  2012 has a lot to live up to.  

The Next Curve Ball

It’s 1:30 in the morning and I’ve just wrapped up catching up on a few of the favorites on the DVR.  I’m wondering how certain people I know are doing.  Some of them are close by. Some of them are very far away. 

Just when you get to the point where your friends, your therapist (and yourself) think you have gotten re-grounded after a rocky few months, another curve ball is bound to come your way.  On a side note, I just found myself smiling when I wrote that – as it made me think of one of my girlfriend’s online photo albums titled “2011…Take 2!”.  I’m not sure what “take” I am on but I am pretty certain I am past my second.

I know what curve ball is coming my way – I was warned about it on Friday after an extremely tough week at work.  The funny thing is, as much as I want to throw my hands up with the situation, when it comes down to it, it’s just another curve ball.  Life will go on…in a different way…but it will go on.  I always like to believe there are reasons that go along with what life throws at us.  Like there is a lesson to be learned or some message we are supposed to get from it.  Don’t get me wrong – there are some days I don’t believe that at all.  Well, that’s not entirely true…I probably still do believe it, but the curve ball is so frustrating and unfair, it feels as if there cannot be a logical explanation for it.   But I guess do still believe it. 

I’ve had some things I’ve needed to work on in 2011.  At the beginning of the year, I thought I had most of them worked out.  Unfortunately I had to find out in a difficult way, I still needed some work, but it feels good coming out on the other side of all of it, especially with friends who know you too well and your therapist whom you’ve been working with every step of the way, saying how impressed and proud of you they are.  Don’t get me wrong – there is always something more to work on – it’s the beauty of being human.  We always get to have our faults and flaws.  But we also get to have people in our life who love all of us - including every fault and flaw.  It’s nice to be one of those people for yourself. 

I get one more “day off” before I have to deal with this next pitch.  At least I know I am getting thrown a curve ball so I can at least be a little prepped for it.  On Monday, I get to choose how I am going to hit it.  Bundt?  Walk?  Hit it out of the park?  I honestly do not know, and for the first time in a long time, I am completely OK with that.  

The Loss of Love and Life

July 2011 will go down in my history book as one of the worst months I have had to experience. 

I have two people I work with every day – Joy Norman was one of them.  Joy passed away this weekend.  I have spent more time with her over the past year than I have anyone else.  I called Joy “ladybug” to her face and I called her “my favorite” behind her back.   She took her most recent Facebook profile picture in my office.  I told her that day that she looked like a nerd.  She had fake glasses and these ridiculous suspenders.  She laughed and said, “good” as it was the look she was going for. 

It took me all day to cry.  I guess I felt like I had to keep myself together so that someone was the strong one for my staff.  The calls I had to make were worse than the call I received, giving me the news.  I had to break 11 hearts today as I told each of my employees that Joy was gone.  This evening I exhaled and it all came out with no one there to hold my hand.  

I lost the man I love this month as well.  Thank God it wasn’t from death, although some days it feels like it was.  I'm not sure I have truly trusted anyone since a relationship in 2003.  It took me 2 years to get over that one and another 6 to learn to love again.  This recent relationship taught me how to trust again, how to love again.  It taught me how to be completely honest with someone else and to show sides of myself that I was too scared to share in relationships before.  I believed the relationship wasn’t going anywhere.  And as soon as I did, it was gone.  

Tonight I went and saw Sarah McLaughlin at the Hollywood Bowl.  I was far from being in the mood to go. I sat there in the dark, listening to the lyrics with great sadness.  Songs that I had heard 100 times before took on such a different meaning as I thought about my two losses.  He broke my heart.  She broke my soul.  But somehow, both made me feel more alive tonight.  I thought about so much while I was sitting there.  The moon was perfect.  The weather was perfect.  The music created a greater than perfect soundtrack to my evening.  The lyrics were an incredible combo of love, the loss of love, having hope in something, letting go, forgiving yourself, forgiving others, Heaven, life, the loss of life.  I sat there with tears streaming down my face, thinking about the man that was supposed to be sitting next to me and the girl that I would never see again.   

I have lost a man that I love.  I have lost my ladybug.  I love you both and am so thankful for you being a part of my life. 

“Hold on.  Hold on to yourself.  This is going to hurt like hell”.  – Sarah McLachlan

Hope

It’s interesting how people hold on to something, whether good or bad, until they actually need it or until it doesn’t serve a purpose for them anymore. In just the last week, I’ve found two “ideas” that have been just that – some things I’ve picked up and kept close to me, waiting for a purpose and waiting to let go.

A few months ago, I came across a quote that really resonated with me. I had looked up an artist whom I had met many years ago though my days in radio. She had written a few songs that I had held on to, as they offered me a soundtrack when going through particularly difficult times, or times where I was down and wanted to believe someone else understood what I was feeling. I came across some of her newer thoughts online and found this particular quote that made me take a deep breath and sigh, finding my feelings once again put into words by someone else.

“It’s amazing how the human spirit clings to hope – even at the end of an exhausting cycle of disappointment – Yet here I am, about to try something new and dare to hope again. Why do I hope? Because I am stubborn enough to keep believing in what I do not yet see.” – Jo Davidson

I held on to these words, not having the motivation or even the strength to create my own piece of art out of them. All I knew at the time was that I was tired of being disappointed. In fact, I was exhausted by it. But that hope never did go away. I’m not even sure if it was weakened at all by the cycle of disappointment.

I sit here months later, finally having found the spark to get back into my own version of creativity and I came across Jo’s words, which now resonate in a very different way for me. Recently, my stubbornness paid off and I got a glimpse of what I kept believing in. My glimpse is what they call in the therapy world, a “corrective emotional experience”. Something or someone shows you that things can be different than the previous experiences you have had. We learn to behave a certain way based off of those old experiences and hold on to those behaviors because they are what we know - how we know - to cope with the experiences in the past. The problem we run into is letting go of these past experiences long enough to process and embrace the corrective one. To quote my friend Robert, “The therapeutic work will be distinguishing what is still appropriate self-protection and what is operating from the past that no longer serves you”. If I can let go of what I have experienced in the past and allow my behaviors and thoughts to match my new experience, I might even be able to let go of the word “hope” and let it manifest into “reality”. It can be a very difficult thing to do, but I am trying.

It seems to me that it is the only thing we can do – Trying. Hoping. Letting go. Loving. Having faith and trusting that someday… it will work out.