Pausing to Breathe: A Moment of Silence for Life Transitions
It’s amazing what you can learn about yourself when in the midst of big life choices, whether they be a physical move, a job or career change, financial gains or losses, a romantic relationship beginning or ending, new boundaries in any relationship, a marriage, a baby, questioning your spirituality and faith, and even a loss or grief of a friendship ending.
In the past five years, I’ve had some serious life shifts. Actually, I’d call it more like a flood of changes without any reprieve. All of the above minus a having a baby in the past five years, and some of these have occurred multiple times over. I want to share about these big shifts because they’ve brought me a wealth of knowledge of my own capacity, but I’m also writing this to hopefully encourage you… To share that adjustment takes on different forms for everyone and it’s okay.
Just last Fall, I began seeing a new therapist out here in Colorado. After I got my invoice I looked up the medical billing code expecting to see “bipolar I disorder” but instead it read “adjustment disorder”. I didn’t even know what this was but it’s essentially unhealthy or imbalanced coping whether it be acute or more long-term (exceeding six months) as a result of a life change or stressor (or series of them). I found this explanation from the Cleveland Clinic helpful. These are common symptoms:
Feeling sad, hopeless or not enjoying things you used to enjoy
Frequent crying
Worrying or feeling anxious, nervous, jittery or stressed out
Trouble sleeping
Lack of appetite
Difficulty concentrating
Feeling overwhelmed
Difficulty functioning in daily activities
Withdrawing from social supports
Avoiding important things such as going to work or paying bills
It’s mostly treated via psychotherapy (talk therapy) but sometimes anti-anxiety or antidepressant medications are used supplementally. When I read this, I was both stunned and relieved at the same time. It was almost as if I was able to see my own story with clear eyes. “Of course, this makes sense,” I thought. Quite literally, these recent years have been an extended stay in making one adjustment after another… No wonder I was experiencing dysregulation and difficulty keeping up.
Looking back at the past five years brings me a confluence of joy and grief. More happy tears than sad, but wow, so much has changed. For my own sake, I want to recount the major changes from these past several years to see what comes up. Bear with me while I list it all…
I reconnected with Micah in April of 2018. I was transitioning out of a job doing sales and marketing for a social enterprise that same month, and also exiting my last major hospitalization back in Kentucky that had me in and out of acute care over the course of about six weeks. That summer, I started a job that launched me into the fundraising and development world in July after a multi-week road trip. It was also in July of 2018 just before embarking on that career change that I also realized I never wanted to date again. I was done entertaining other options and was all-in for this man of mine who was/is by my side.
In February of 2019, not even a year later, we got engaged on the top of a bunch of rocks at Red River Gorge. I wasted no time and immediately began wedding planning. This sped-up way of approaching this huge life event was counterintuitive but felt pressing because within that same week Micah put a ring on it, we got word of a likely move to Colorado for his work.
Just a couple months later in April, we visited Colorado again to begin looking for an apartment. Funny enough that job ended up getting put on hold for two years, but we did decide to elope while on that trip. I knew I wanted to for a variety of reasons, but it was ultimately a day-of decision that only a handful of humans knew about, so, suffice it to say, I had some nerves that followed. I was delighted to be officially joining together as one unit, and I felt strange about keeping it a secret. (At the close of that year, we added this fun fact in our Christmas card which felt fitting.)
We got home, both giddy and a little unsure about who to tell, if anyone. We clued in the parents and a few select friends over the course of a month… It felt good to share, but risky too. My parents were happy for us and asked if we still wanted to follow through with a big ole celebration. It’s hard for me to pass up a party, especially one with all of my favorite people, so we kept the date and made a big go of it. While it was certainly excessive, I’m still so glad we did that. The first nine months that followed our big day were, to put it plainly, just really, really hard.
As circumstances would have it, I’d already given the notice for that fundraising job, so I was in a bind. No more salary or benefits, but I was able to renegotiate to work for less and on a contract. Meanwhile, Micah was searching too, so freelancing was the main move while he simultaneously worked in a retail stockroom (thank you Lululemon). Post wedding and pre life feeling like a monsoon for months on end, we had our honeymoon road trip for another couple of weeks across the Southwestern states. What a core set of memories.
And then, mid-July, reality hit and we realized we needed to make a move locally. The mortgage on the house we were in was too high for us at that time, we had so much income dissolve so fast, so we moved that December into an apartment just miles from the house we were in. To mask the financial constraints that led us there, we told ourselves it was because we wanted to prepare to be able to get up and move cross-country at a moment’s notice if the opportunity presented itself.
Just a few short months later, in March of 2020, I had my 30th birthday – what I would consider a milestone birthday– that just so happened to fall the same weekend the world shut down. I had planned a huge party that only a few brave souls showed up to. That alone felt like a major letdown. Embarking on this next decade without the community of the majority of my favorite people was just deflating and somber. I was disappointed and discouraged. Little did I know at that moment, it would only get harder in the coming months as the pandemic set in full force.
The next year and a half would be marked by a deep period of introspection, loneliness and a lot of strange grief. I say strange because Micah and I were certainly newly married still, less than a year in, but I was just then able to really process the fact that I was in a whole new phase of life. I hadn’t slowed down enough to even sit with the fact that I was now a married woman who was not just on her own, individual journey of becoming whole, but I was linked with someone who was also healing, processing and becoming his own person too.
And to top it off, we were suddenly quite limited to the same few rooms working out this new life we were building, this new level of relationship. I craved more time alone, more breaks to go be in solitude to think and feel (yes, I’m a hermit)... it just felt like a never ending conversation, sometimes healthy and productive, but sometimes the same topics on repeat cycle.
Despite what I heard some people in relationships say, I was filled with a lot of conflicting emotions. I was trying to figure out how to be in a dynamic, growing and thriving relationship in the first place (that was a new endeavor for me), and, with that, learning how to be painstakingly vulnerable and honest… but without a space to go process on my own accord, the introvert in me was chronically fatigued, sometimes even fuming, and ultimately just frustrated. I wanted time and space just for me. So, I walked, a lot.
And it was in that same time period, I began to show my full, uninhibited, even unhinged at times, self to Micah. I cried a lot. I fell apart often and showed the unpretty parts of myself. And, all the while, I was learning how to live life in tandem with a real, genuine partner who showed me boundless grace and patience. I learned in this season how to be accepted - an invaluable gift that I’m not sure I would’ve learned as quickly outside of that incubation period during the beginning of the pandemic.
We made it through those messy months that went on what felt like forever. Oh, and on top of all that, we also decided to list that house we’d moved out of in April of 2020. Great timing. We nearly foreclosed on that house but thankfully, just barely made it out of the hole a few thousand dollars later. Talk about a yikes moment. I remember thinking, “How in the world is this real?”
At the end of 2020 in December, I took a leap and decided to change up my work, because frankly I was bored and had stopped growing. I doubt I was alone in feeling a need to mix-it-up, to find a change of pace. In the next six months though, I held three different full-time salaried jobs - one in healthcare sales, the next in nonprofit on the partnerships side, and then in regional recruiting. I felt absolutely ridiculous for doing that and was worried how I was being perceived, but there was a thought process.
The first step was working at a senior medical center in sales/ new business lead generation and was about as unfortunate as it might sound. I was sought out for the position though, which felt good so I puzzled it together in my mind and made a go of it. Through that job, I found a mental health nonprofit that I thought I’d be growing with for years… the Executive Director was priming me to take the lead later down the road… this was it, I thought; this would be the next decade of my career. And then, all at once, Micah and I were being solicited for work in our dream state, Colorado. The timing was aligned, we were ready to leave Louisville, and so, we mustered up every bit of courage we had and decided to go for it.
Pause please:
As I’m typing this, I am realizing just how wild this all sounds… change, even seasons of it is one thing, but this was three full years of my life without any breaks, slow-downs, or periods of sameness or regularity. It was new, new and more new all at once, raining on me.
Just like actually getting rained on… it can feel refreshing, even exhilarating at first… but when it’s still raining, even while the sun is shining and you’re on the beach in Florida, you still get soaked and feel like you can’t catch a break. (Weird analogy, yeah, but I think you get what I mean.)
Even though so many of those life changes were *such* good things, it was still overwhelming – I still needed time to mentally and emotionally catch up to where I was.
I won’t go into much more of my own series of transitions. Yes, there’s been a few since we moved here two summers ago, but really one job change for me and the rest is really just finding community and comfort all over again. We’ve been in Colorado since August of 2021, so just over a year-and-a-half ago, and it still, in many ways, feels brand new. Getting to know a place and its people isn’t an overnight endeavor; it takes time, energy, and a healthy dose of grit to make a new place yours.
If you’ve ever moved away from home or out-of-state, you probably are familiar with the waves of emotions and epiphanies that come with leaving everything you know. All of the familiarity, even for the things you never really liked or noticed much, you knew what was there, what to expect and the nature of things in your hometown. Sure, I know how to get to my everyday spots, the grocery, my favorite restaurants, the hair salon and dog groomer all just fine, but I’m certainly still exploring.
I miss things though. I miss the parks back home. I miss calling up a friend who I’ve known for 10+ years and going on a walk. I miss driving to my favorite ice cream stand that I started going to in elementary school. I miss the smell of driving on certain streets with the windows down in spring. I miss stopping in at family’s houses just to pop-in and say hi, have a cup of coffee. I miss the comfort of knowing an alternate route, or three, to get anywhere I wanted to go. While I don’t miss living in the same space, I do miss the parts of it that made it feel like what it was– my home.
Transitions of all sorts are kind of like that though, like relocating. They require time above all else to become the new normal, the familiar, and even more time to sink way down into your skin where that place (or whatever the new thing is - a job, a child, a partner, a ___) feels like a part of you.
And as the time passes for the new thing to become the engrained thing, the known and experienced thing, you learn consciously and subconsciously that you are, in fact, able to handle so much more than maybe you thought was possible. You can carry on in the face of immense, possibly even tumultuous, transitions and come out with a stronger, more grounded sense of what has remained consistent at the core of it all – YOU.
I say all of this to say, if you’re adjusting and it’s taking some time, well, you’re in good company. It may take weeks, months, even longer to recalibrate to the new chapter upon you. It may ebb and flow, and that, my friends, is absolutely okay. Celebrate the adjustment time because it means you’re taking risks, embracing change – you’re growing in the gaps. And I’m proud of you.
Take care, and shine your light.
Kindly,
Kelsey