Work Life Balance - A Series, Part Two
Welcome back! We’re about to dive deep into part two of my journey to find balance, which started in chaos and ended in alignment. This stage was the ultimate personal challenge in self-discovery, self-development, and self-awareness. If you haven’t experienced this, I’m going to tell you right now it is not an easy path. But when we know our why, the HOW gets easier (I will repeat that three times throughout this blog).
I had followed my intuition and took the leap of faith by walking away from my career, and as soon as I got home after my last day of work, I felt free. But was I? I still hadn’t decided if I was done-done or if I was just taking a career break. My intention at the time was to take a month off and then “figure it out”. But the time off was not at all what I expected it to be, and that became apparent pretty early on.
I was running on adrenaline in fight or flight mode for 17 years, which is pretty much half my life by the way. I had been out on my own since I was a teen, working in abnormally fast paced environments, climbing the ladder, and striving for more, more, more since that very young age. I didn’t connect with the side effects of stretching myself so thin for all those years until this stage in the process, when I stopped. The first week off was a blur, I felt empowered in a big way, but I was numb so nothing had hit me yet. It really just felt like a typical one-week vacation. When week two rolled around, I started to feel weird. I was confused, frustrated and a little sad. I couldn’t understand why considering this was what I had been subconsciously manifesting for so long and I finally found the courage to do it. Everyone was congratulating me for being so brave, and I get it, it is a very powerful thing to make a decision like I did. But I was not in the mood to celebrate.
I spent the majority of that second week starring at the wall. I wanted to get down to business and map out what I would do next, but I wasn’t getting anywhere—crickets! A big part of me felt that I should be watching Netflix all day and turn my brain off. Battling between the two left me not only unaccomplished but the opposite of relaxed. I was becoming more and more annoyed at myself for wasting this precious time I had been DREAMING about for years. Before I knew it, a month had gone by. It appeared I was detoxing from the rollercoaster of emotions I had been experiencing and the thought of going back to work gave me anxiety. Apparently this was going to take longer than I had anticipated. For your information, this part of the process is critical, and it cannot be rushed if you are truly practicing self-care. The only thing I knew for sure is that I had to empty out my brain so I could fill it back up with things that I wanted to hold space for. But I didn’t know HOW, so in typical ‘me’ form, I was trying to create a process for that. Wrong! Do not try this at home.
I started keeping a journal because I always liked the idea, and writing down my thoughts was helping me become more self-aware. If you are holding back from journaling because you think what you will write down is stupid, join the club—just do it. There is a page in my journal that reads (underlined and capitalized), “Who the hell am I, what am I doing, and why?”. Now I was just mad. I considered myself to be very self-aware, but I was questioning everything at this point. Looking back at part one of the journey, my breakthrough was when I took the deepest breath I could take and it lead me to self-love. In this part of the journey, the big shift was admitting to myself that I was having an identity crisis, and I realized it was because I had been defining myself by my career. So here I was, emotionally, mentally and physically drained asking myself when that happened. When did this way of “living” through your career become normal, acceptable, expected? Because ultimately that’s what it all came down to. Take the career away, take the dependency of a team away, and all of a sudden, it was just me against me. Think about that for a minute. Ask yourself, who are you really when you take your 40 hour work week out of the picture? I wasn’t sure if leaving my high-profile career was the right choice, but eventually I surrendered to my own uncertainty and there was only one way to do that.
This part of the process is crucial, and it cannot be rushed if you are truly practicing self-care.
People who I admire deeply kept sending me the same message, ‘stop trying to force it, do nothing for 30 days’. Admitedly, I have an uncontrollable need to be stimulated all of the time, so if I don’t have a project, I will create one, and another, repeat. Even though I technically didn’t have a job, I had all sorts of balls up in the air, things I had to do. I had clogged up my calendar with a bunch of bullshit to occupy my time, none of which would bring me joy, or money. I got out the white board and I wrote everything down that I had going on, I circled three things I would keep space for, and I said no to everything else. I put the phone down, the white board went away, I shut the door to my office, and I disconnected from social media. No more distractions, I knew I was on to something and I had to check out. Around week eight I had finally stopped planning out my days. Instead, I started playing my time by ear and listening to my body. Now although I still felt I had more work to do, this is where the pressure came off of my shoulders and I started to feel lighter. I gave myself the gift of time, backed with the loving support of my husband.
Let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and embrace who you are.
