Moving Through the Narrows

I bet you’ve all been wondering where I have been for the last 10 months or so. Well, I’ve been wondering that myself. Since we’ve last met I’ve hit what I would metaphorically call a ‘pothole on the road of life.’ Granted I never expected the ‘pothole’ to be a forty-foot wide, pitch black, bottomless pit of despair. That may be over dramatizing it a bit, I’m sure I’ll hit bottom eventually.

I guess it all started about a year ago when I quit a job I hated to take another job I don’t particularly care for now. A few months into the new job I started looking at myself in the mirror not recognizing the person I saw. I was stressed, bored, unhappy with my life and how it’s it had turned out so far. You see at that point I had been doing the same kind of work for over eleven years. It wasn’t work I particularly enjoyed but I was good at it, the bills got paid and the work was pretty easy. In my younger days I figured I could do this work; continue drawing cartoons and work toward getting in that line of work to become a famous cartoonist. Somewhere along the line I lost that motivation and fell into the ‘American Dream.’ I had money to buy things, rent an apartment and go out anytime I wanted. And boy did I ever! I become a ‘regular’ at one of the local bars and earned the nickname ‘The Lush.” Granted, I wasn’t an alcoholic by any means, but I was out with friends drinking and ‘hanging out’ when I should have been concentrating and improving my artwork. I was foolish. As they say ‘Hind sight is 20/20’ and I take full responsibility for my actions. I knew what I was doing (or not doing) so I take the blame for it all.

But with that blame comes guilt. Guilt that I have wasted too much time already and veered off the path I once was on. From the guilt came fear and anxiety - what the HELL do I do now!? Where do I want to go? How do I get there? Who do I want to be? Do I really want to start all over again at my age? These are all questions I kept asking myself over and over and over again. The BF kept asking me the same question as well, “What do you want to do?” “Just pick that and do it.” Now, for those of you who don’t know, my BF is many years my junior and at this point in his life has no concept of the dilemma I am facing in my life. Nor would he for quite some time (if ever.) I told him, “If it was that easy don’t you think I would “just do it”?” I had no answers. All I knew was I wanted to do something different. Something a little more fulfilling.

Gradually I began to share what I was going through with my friends, my family…. my therapist. That’s right I see a shrink! The way the world is going these days we’re all going to need a little therapy. I just got a head start. Well, come to find out many of the people I spoke with felt the same way. No one knew what they wanted. They all were just as stressed out, bored and as miserable as I was. This was GREAT! The odd thing about this was it wasn’t just restricted to people of a certain age. The youngest person I spoke with was twenty-seven. He had been working for the same company for ten years and wanted to move into a new direction. But being only in his late twenties, he realized he had other responsibilities to meet first and some time before he could make that change. Time was a luxury I felt I didn’t have.

At about the same time this was happening to me a book was about to come out which covered the same thing I was going through. I read an excerpt of the book in a series Newsweek had running about the baby boomer generation. Now I never considered myself as part of the ‘Boomer’ generation but I was about to turn forty, so I figured…eh, what the hell? Close enough. The author, Sara Davidson, described in the article the transition she and some famous (and not so famous) people were going through moving from one phase of her life into this new beginning. She called it going through ‘The Narrows.’ (Hence, the new title of my blog.)

Davidson herself, a writer for television, was moved through ‘The Narrows’ in her own life. The man she had been with for eight years just left her, her kids had all but moved away and she couldn’t get work to save her life. This was the beginning of her journey into her new life and she wasn’t alone. In the book she interviews the likes of Carly Simon, Cheryl Tiegs and former Senator Tom Hayden. They all have made their trip through ‘The Narrows’ and come out the other side a better person. Reading this I hoped I could do the same and was comforted in the fact that I wasn’t the only one. The book is called “ LEAP! What will we do with the rest of our lives?” Pick it up! Ok, shameless PR is over, back to the train wreck which is my life.

So I tried to come up with some sort of plan to put me on a happier and healthier path to living. Before getting started on the blueprint for the rest of my life I needed to ask myself some key questions:

What do I want to do? Hmmm…I’ll get back to myself on that one.

Am I willing to take a pay cut? Before answering that question the BF and I sat down to figure out what would be the minimum salary I could live off. I was willing to take a pay cut, but could I afford it? And not be a financial burden on him. Yes, I could afford to take a pay cut.

Would I be willing to start at the bottom again? When you’re in hell there’s nowhere else to go but up.

Would I be willing to work under people younger than myself? My BF is 14 years my junior. Yeah, I think I can handle that.

With most of those questions answered I set off to work on my plan, the road map to the rest of my life

I’m still working on it. But at least for now I am on the path and I have a direction. I may not know where I’m going but I’ll know when I get there.