I’ve been putting off writing this post for almost four
months now. I’d like to know how this particular story I’m living ends before I
go talking about it… ONLINE. Indelibly. But I’m beginning to realize that
stories don’t really end, at least most of the time. And I like stories that end—that I can tie up
with a neat little bow, tack on the life lesson, and shove it out onto the
internet. That doesn’t seem to be
happening right now, so this post is going to be a little different. Rather than my normal thesis, argument,
conclusion (classically trained homeschooler, anyone?) this is going to be more
disjointed, stream of consciousness (my English 104 professor would be proud of
me.)
In any event, this story does have a beginning… I quit my
job. In December, I handed in my two weeks notice to the job that I had held
and loved for 4 ½ years. My last day at
work was the day before my 25th birthday (I tried not to see it as
symbolic. Failed.) So many factors played into my decision, but the bottom line
was that I truly believed that God was telling me it was time to move on. I
dithered, however, really wishing that there was a different answer, mostly
because I had a really hard time telling the difference between running away
and leaving a situation that was not getting better, but slowly worse. I finally told God that I was going to just
hand in my notice, barring Divine intervention. And there was none… I looked.
So I gave my notice. It was an immense
relief, while it also broke my heart. That job had been the largest part of my
life for 4 years, and my coworkers had become like family.
I had never had to job hunt before. I’d gone straight from
college to an internship that had turned into my four-year career. Now, 2 weeks before Christmas, I’m
unemployed. It’s not that I was worried about being unemployed- one of the
perks of still living in your parents’ house is that you can’t get evicted. So
I gave myself until the new year to just enjoy the holiday (it had been four
years since I hadn’t had to think about working either new years eve or new
years brunch). After the holidays were
over, I started searching Craigslist, Indeed.com, and a host of other job sites
for work. It took a month and a half for me to find something… and it was a
frustrating month and a half. I hadn’t realized just how much I’d tied my
identity and self-confidence into what I did and that I was good at it. I was
embarrassed to say that I was unemployed, and was becoming more and more
worried that I wasn’t good at anything else (but I really didn’t want to cook
anymore.)
Putting aside my existential crises for the moment, I did
find a job that looked like it might just be my dream job. I was hired as an innkeeper
at a winery-owned B&B that was just opening up. I love the Finger Lakes, and I love B&B
hospitality, so it seemed like a match made in heaven. Long story short (mostly
because I don’t want to badmouth an existing business), it’s looking less and less
likely that this will be a long-term position for me. What I’m currently doing
at my job bears almost no resemblance to what I was hired for, and while I’m
being paid well, it’s not a career.
~*~
All of this to say, I don’t know where my life is heading at
this point. I wish I did. Certainly, I don’t like the limbo that I’m in—the
fact that I can’t even picture what my future might look like. But I’ve learned several things in the past
six months… some of them were things that I’ve known but only fully realized
lately, and some were things that whacked me in the forehead, a la a V8
commercial.
1.Fear is terrible.
I’ve never known what it is to truly be afraid before. Part of what led
me to leave my old job was the VERY sudden onset of anxiety. I’ve always been
pretty laid-back; never one to worry about everything being exactly
perfect and just so. And even when I did
worry about something, I could normally reason myself to calmness. Suddenly, I
started having panic attacks at work (God was good even in that- I was able to
pretty much keep the severity of them to myself.) But I would find myself
suddenly terrified that I had somehow not washed something properly, or touched
something that had touched something that would contaminate the food I was
preparing. Up until that point I’d never realized exactly how panic attacks
worked—I always thought that you could just get over it. Nope. I would stand in
the kitchen, literally paralyzed with fear, cold sweats, not able to get past
the fact that I might have done something that might hurt someone.
The worst part was that I knew that nothing had changed—that
I had done the same process hundreds of times and that the result was always
fine, but I couldn’t reassure myself and stop the fear. But knowing that only freaked me out even
more, because suddenly I knew that I could no longer trust my perception of
things.
I’m sure that my
panic attacks were (are—they’re not completely gone yet) mild compared to what
some people suffer. After all, they did pass after about fifteen minutes (most
of the time), and I never did go on medication (although I probably could have
gotten a prescription-- I was stressed
enough to lose between three and five pounds). What was also frightening was
that I really couldn’t pinpoint a trigger as to why I’d suddenly started having
panic attacks. Surely something had to have caused this—something in my life
had changed, or…
I’ve come to the conclusion that there really was no
trigger… it’s a spiritual issue. I thought I could escape it by changing jobs.
While that did help, it didn’t eradicate the problem.
2. On a related note, it took me probably six months to
realize that I’m not trusting God if I’m still hanging on to/ worrying over
what I’ve handed to Him in prayer. All
during my panic attacks, I was praying desperately. And God certainly helped
me, but I had a very hard time letting go of what my “worry” was. I wish I
remember where I read it, but I was reading something somewhere, and it
essentially said that, once you’ve given something to God, trusting Him means
letting go of it. Ouch. And here I thought I was really good at trusting God.
3. As I started my new job, and it began to be clear that
what I’d expected wasn’t what was going to be happening, I got frustrated. I
wanted to be an innkeeper, not a secretary/handyman/jill-of-all-trades. And as
I prayed about it: whether I should stay, if I should push at my boss to start
moving in the direction that I really wanted to see us go, God made something
really clear to me. Sometimes, trusting
Him means letting go of what I think [God’s] plan is, and focusing on the next
step that God puts in front of me. I thought God had put me there to be an
innkeeper, to work in the hospitality business, but I also knew that He had put
me HERE, and if that was the case, then His plan in this situation was obviously
not what I thought it was.
4. I’ve known this for a while, but it’s becoming more and
more clear to me the longer this limbo continues. I am happiest when I am
closest to God’s will for me—no matter what that entails. The hard part is that
I think I know what God wants me to do, and when His leading doesn’t seem to be
in the direction that I think it should go, I dig my heels in. I don’t need to elaborate on how stupid that
particular method of thinking is.
5. I only recently realized this… God is using this process
to break me. He’s being incredibly gentle about, and I’m so thankful, but I’m
suddenly seeing myself as so much less in control, so much less
“got-it-all-together” than I thought I did. I didn’t really see this until a
couple of weeks ago, when I got choked up in the middle of a solo special in
church. This may not seem like a huge deal if you don’t know me that well, but
if you do, then you know: I hate crying.
I will make all sorts of faces, try to laugh, do just about anything to
keep from crying in front of people. I don’t even like crying in private (I
tend to stuff it all down and then have a major meltdown every couple of
months.) Lately, it’s been like someone turned on a faucet. I’ll get choked up over sermons, and I can’t
sing along to half of my favorite Christian songs anymore because my throat
tightens up, and Ann Voskamp’s blog posts make me cry like a baby. On a side
note, she’s awesome and you should really check out her blog and read her book,
One Thousand Gifts, it’s kind of
life-changing. Going back to that
special music break-down, I never had a problem while practicing it, and I
never anticipated any problems while singing it. It was Andrew Peterson’s “Let
me Sing,” and I’ve sung “Welcome to Our World” on Christmas eve! If there were
ever a song to get choked up in the middle of, that is it, not “Let me Sing.”
But as your heart breaks, it gets softer.
God is so good—I’ve heard stories about how people have been
broken and remade through horrible, traumatic events. All that’s happened to me
is anxiety and job upheaval. I’m not saying I’ve reached where He wants me to
be, but I can see it happening. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised—I did pray
that He would draw me closer to Him. How better to do that than to shake me up
enough that I had to hold on to Him for stability because I couldn’t trust my
own reasoning anymore?
I used to have the standard “raised in a Christian home,
saved when I was young…” so-on-and-so-forth testimony. I “knew” I was a sinner,
“knew” I was broken, claimed that “without God, my life would be a mess,” and
believed it to be true, theoretically. But practically, I had it pretty well
together… until I didn’t. There’s very few things better at making you realize
what a mess you are than panic attacks over a broken dish. I never knew what it
meant to have to count on God just to get me through the day in one piece (no
pun intended), until now. Feeling out of control is one of the things that unnerves
me the most, and I learned just how little control I really had over my life.
6. On a lighter note, during that month and a half of
unemployment, I realized again just how horrible I am at managing free
time. I had huge plans for how much I
was going to get done—craft projects, writing, visits to friends… Almost none
of it happened. It was (is) incredibly frustrating. Time simply seems to
evaporate for me. I’ve always been good at getting distracted and frittering
away a lot more time than I realize. I keep praying for better time management
skills.
7. I’m learning more and more about where my passions really
are, vocationally. As I’ve done many different things for this new job, and
looked at other jobs, I’ve seen more of a draw in myself to the small business
community of the Finger Lakes, and a passion for hospitality in the
old-fashioned sense of the term: taking care of people. I love helping someone
else to succeed, to enjoy a vacation; whatever it is that they need.
8. This is going to sound strange, but here it is… I’m
realizing that I’m kind of cool. I had friends at my old job, and I knew that
they liked me, but I always felt that they kind of wished that I were
different. That they liked me in spite of the fact that I didn’t party, didn’t
cuss, talked about church, talked about nerdy things that they had no idea
about (books, BBC movies, English Country Dancing). I have a new set of
coworkers now, and they seem to like me because of all those things, which is
new for me. It’s also been eye-opening that these coworkers want to introduce
me to new things (broaden my horizons, just as my old coworkers wanted to) ,
but their idea of that is not taking me out partying because “you’ll like it if
you’d just try it!”. Rather, they mean things like drive-in movies, new kinds
of music, new kinds of food (you will never get me to like goat cheese,
however.)
9. Last but not least, I’m learning to say “yes” to random
things; things that I would have initially written off as “not my idea of fun”
or boring. Back in February I decided to
go to a Singles conference hosted by Family Life Network. Admittedly, I started
it out with kind of a bad attitude, but by the end of the weekend, I was really
glad that I had gone. I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to say yes, yet, but
I’m trying to make a habit of not shrugging things off because I’m initially
not terribly interested. I complain that my life is boring and I have no social
life, but then turn down invitations… doesn’t take a genius to see who is
causing the problem.
If you’ve borne with me this far, then thank you. I suppose
it really shouldn’t be a surprise that God is using this current uncertain
stage of my life to teach me all sorts of things, both significant and
seemingly insignificant, which of course means that I’m exactly where I ought
to be right now and therefore it’s really not an unstable stage of life… I just
have a tendency to forget that God has a much better sense of balance than I
do.
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