I made it through Christmas. I finished baking, got the presents wrapped and tried to enjoy what I knew was the last year our son might actually believe in Santa. While we celebrated Christmas Eve with friends, in the back of my head, I was hoping we would wake up to a snowstorm that kept us at home. We were not prepared food-wise to make Christmas dinner at home, but I dreaded having to keep a smile on my face while celebrating with our extended family. The idea of travelling from place to place, surrounded by people and pretending I was happy and that everything was alright was way beyond my coping abilities.
I felt like I was living with a dark cloud over my head and the air around me felt heavy and humid, like summer air just before a thunderstorm. It was oppressive. I felt like I was suffocating. I wanted to crawl into bed and sleep, but my brain would not shut down. It was stuck in a loop consisting of the moment I read the email, the Leadership meeting back in October, and the fact my review earlier in the year had been postponed. I thought of how I knew the new role was not right for me. I thought of all the times I prioritized work ahead of my family and moments when I was too exhausted to see friends and too exhausted to be intimate with my husband. Everything was rushing around in my head, jumbled, moving rapidly from one thought to another. It was a kaleidoscope of thoughts and emotions I had held in for too long. The dam inside me broke. I felt broken and bruised, as if I had been bounced around trying to body surf in rapids.
I retreated into myself. I was trying to determine what my next step was. I had never felt this way before. I was in a dark tunnel with no light or end. I knew I had to do something.
I picked up Simon Sinek’s workbook Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team. I purchased it a while ago after enjoying his first book but had not gotten around to reading it. Now, I felt pulled towards it in a more purpose-driven way.
If you haven’t read Sinek’s first book, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, you should consider it. I read it a number of years ago. In fact, it was around that time that I started to recognize my alignment with my job, and the company was starting to fall out of sync. I had begun to feel a chasm develop previously, but I had pegged it to hitting my mid-forties and all of the fun that comes with a woman getting older, my son becoming more active in sports and extracurricular activity and the amount of travel I was doing for work. I chalked it up to just being tired. I was tired of being the perfect wife, mom, boss, and employee.
In both books, Sinek describes his concept of the Golden Circle, which contains three circles and equates this to “what we do,” “how we do it,” and “why we do it.” “Why we do it” provides a more profound, more emotional, and significant value that matches with the fact that we make decisions based on how we feel about the decision and then use points to justify our decision. This concept spoke to me. It did not resonate with many of my colleagues who found it too“touchy-feely.” I, on the other hand, found that Sinek’s concepts spoke truth to my experiences - in work and in life in general. The book gave voice to certain deeply-felt needs that I’d long harboured: including the need to feel meaningfully connected with who I work with and what I do. I studied the guide. I began working through the concepts Sinek presented. I knew - could feel it in my core - that finding my “Why” was going to be important; it was going to be imperative for me to regain some calm and figure out how to get out of the dark tunnel.
For the next week, I read, researched, studied, reflected, and cried. I cried a lot. In retrospect, it felt like I was mourning, mourning what, I’m not sure, but somewhere in me, a door I had been pushing against to keep closed had won the battle and burst open. I knew I had to allow all the emotions to surface, acknowledge what I was feeling and determine what I was going to do with them. It was painful. I know that my son did not understand what was going on and why mommy was so sad, and I know that I was not giving him the attention he deserved during one of the most exciting times of the year for a child. I knew that for our future, for my relationship with him and my husband and for my ability to be truly present in our life as a family, I needed to work on myself.
Originally published on October 29, 2020 (https://girlintheredhatblog.wordpress.com/)
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