Without leaving

Hope by Bern Altman of Great Falls, VA courtesy stockXchng

I know my own luck. I know how rare it is for a person to be able to do this. And I know more and more what I’m doing it for. I feel a kind of strength starting to happen that is wholly legitimate, that is not some trapping I wear until it falls off. It is though the thing has roots, and seeks the sun with its face turned toward it. And I know I never would have found it without leaving. — Elizabeth Berg, from The Pull of the Moon (Random House, 1996).

Since I’ve been working in marketing writing, I’ve had four jobs, and each job has had something of a dramatic ending, followed by a period of some trauma or painful event, followed by a surge of skills growth and personal development.

So I suppose it should come as no surprise to me that the ending of my fourth and latest job should have been dramatic (soap-opera worthy, complete with tears and walking out with the contents of my cubicle in the biggest empty box I could find), abrupt (my contract was terminated at 7:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, over the telephone–oh the havoc I could have unleashed if I had been in the mood, with all those passwords active and the big Box none the wiser! but I digress), and painful (securing my unemployment benefits took almost 9 weeks).

What is surprising is the flow of speculative project work that has been coming my way, all of it enormously promising to my career in a make-it-now-and-don’t-look-back kind of way. I am working on a killer book project with a college friend; a potential booming new business with an old colleague is in the works; and just today, my sister asks me if I want to, um, I dunno, start a business with some help from an angel investor who looks like my brother-in-law? While I was navigating the perils of an unsteady contract, fearing every day that I would lose my job and oh by the way, starting to hate that place, I was frantically searching for a life preserver in the form of a new job. But if my contract had not been terminated, I never would have seen all those safety rings waiting in the water.

Most of my life I pursued “something else” because I believed writing was never going to pay off.  Now I sometimes mourn all that time I wasted, not writing. I supposed middle age is a fine time to realize I could make the very most of the lots of time left, if I get off my ass now.

Oh, and poems are coming back to me now. Poetry!–something I thought I’d never feel a spark for again! I had not written a new poem in at least seven years, and in the last three days I’ve written three. They suck, but still . . .! Poetry. Wow.