Untethered

Permission to quit.

An unfamiliar feeling has been stalking me lately. I think it's freedom.

For as long as I could hold a pen or turn on a computer, I've been dedicated to a cause of some kind. 

That dedication to career has come with some additional baggage - work hard, get promoted, make money, get further promoted, spend money, continue to work hard.

Even though the cancer danger zone continuously looms ahead, the last few years has felt a lot like someone has been flying my life on auto-pilot.

I hadn’t fully comprehended that planes still crash on auto-pilot.  Sometimes a technical glitch or a random event like a bird strike. Whatever the cause, that ejection seat lives up to its name by literally ejecting you out of an otherwise very sensible, pre-planned and direct path.

The flying visuals are two-fold - recently, it’s because I’m spending more time looking up at the birds flying over the bay in wonderment that they know how to trust an intangible, unpredictable and invisible thing - the wind.

It's also inspired by the new Top Gun: Maverick movie. At the end of movie indulgence no. 5, I was yet again sitting in the chair with free-flowing tears. With some gentle prodding by my fellow Top-Gun-appreciating-friend, I felt compelled to consider the unanswered questions lingering about why this movie has resonated so strongly (beyond an appreciation of baby-oiled pilots playing beach dogfight football!). 

The movie for me is far beyond the awe of aeronautical acrobatics. It's about redemption, how to let go of grief, and how to let go of long-held beliefs that we are what we do. I’m sure Maverick never imagined a life without his Ray Bans and a joystick in his hands.  But by the end of the new movie (and 35 years to figure it out since the first movie), he has discovered what one might tentatively call happiness - achievement through teaching, meaning through connection, and self-identity defined through the eyes of those who choose to love him for who he is when he’s no longer wearing those Navy whites.

A few months ago when I was awaiting cancer screening results (the usual annual torture), I had declared an empty threat-to-self, "If it comes back again, I guess that's THE sign that this way of working is not working for me anymore".

I was sitting on the top of the stairs holding my breath as my doctor told me the results ... "Oh, really? Oh, that's great, thank God." Oh but wait, that means I now have to go back. The words were tumbling out of my mind and my mouth before I could desperately shovel them in again.

Back to strapping myself down to the desk and bracing for yet another daily cycle of manufactured urgency at the expense of my own sanity and self-care. Every day was "Blurs-day". Every day was filled with stress and distress.

I found myself in tears at the end of that doctor's phone call - a messy combination of pure relief but also despair.

The truth is, at that moment, I was willing anything as an excuse to not go back to the daily practice of ‘work’ as I had come to experience it. I hated my job. I hated my life. In fact, I didn't have a life. I was on auto-pilot. But there I was willing another cancer scare (my very own bird strike) so that I could take full advantage of the ejector seat button and get the hell out of the plane I found myself in. 

The next scary self-inflicted chit-chat was asking what am I not letting go of; what am I waiting for to enable the declaration of “Enough Already”.

Like a certain 59 year old Top Gun pilot, I had no clue who I was outside of my full time job. My title. My salary. The only certainty I had was to get in the lift and ride it to the next floor so I could search out the prize of higher salaries, longer titles and seemingly greater importance to the world. Because I should. Because everyone else is, and if I don't, then I must be a failure. 

And that's what I had to let go of - my fear of failing. It wasn’t actually about the career. I was, in fact, failing myself. Again. How many 'a-ha' moments can a person be afforded on the other side of not one but two cancer diagnoses? I’m pretty certain there’s no prize for a future cancer diagnosis no.3.

The long held attachment to my work identity has been to the detriment of my self identity.

It took three months of pondering, but last week I made a new choice. I asked for a part-time role at work. And this week, I registered for an ABN. The first day in my 'new life' felt like I had dropped 20kgs of despair. The recent volatility of my mental health was finally on a low simmer.  I was involuntarily smiling at strangers. Watching the clouds. Dancing in the kitchen with my cat (well, I was dancing, she was sitting in silent judgement).

Sometimes other people don't offer the permission, so we have to take it for ourselves. Sometimes, if time and space allow, we have to quit. No job is worth the cost of our own free will and emotional safety. I don’t want to fly on auto-pilot, I want to wear Ray Bans and hold a pink joystick! And I don’t want my gravestone to be inscribed with my CV’s work achievements. I want it to say that I have lived a full life defined by love, meaning, and connection.

I'm not naïve in thinking that this recent decision of part-time work/part-time side hustle will magically transport me to the world of life-work balance (because it is a fantasy). But what I have granted myself is permission to seek and create more balance - it may not be possible every day, but it will be possible in moments of every day.  A 10 min walk, a quiet cup of tea, a podcast, a book, a Top Gun movie.

Will my little side hustle fail? Who knows. I hope not. Funnily enough, I started this blog site four years ago about taking permission to pause. And I have failed. But I’m trying again. And in this life, I'm the one who gets to define 'failure' as much as 'success'. The possibilities are mine to create; the limitations are mine to impose.

 In the meantime, I finally have the freedom to dream about what those possibilities could be (and a certain beach dogfight football movie scene).

Best Laid Plans.

Reconciling what was and what now is

I thought I had planned everything in the lead up to my first day back at work. Right down to where I was going to get my morning coffee.  When I drove into work and saw my favourite coffee place had a ‘for lease’ sign in the front window, it was probably an omen of the morning that was coming. If only I had included on my list “managing disproportionate emotional response to Every-Thing”.

I wasn’t prepared for the electric shock every time someone walked past and I saw them pause; their puzzled brain-cells trying to reconcile the familiar face but unfamiliar hair-cut… and then the gradual increase in volume: “Jodie !!! You’re BACK !!!” At first, a lovely, albeit loud, sense of re-connection. But after the 10th time, I hit my ever-so-quick-to-disintegrate emotional threshold. I managed to delay losing my shit for the 3 minutes it took me to scramble for the comfort of the lift and find some outside oxygen.

It’s been two months since I’ve been back at work. Some days I feel like time has stood still for that whole year and I’ve just walked back in from getting a coffee. But other days I feel the weight of a cancer carcass strapped to my leg … Do people see it when I walk by? Do I look like someone who had cancer? (the short back and sides is a bit of a giveaway). Is that what people are saying in the kitchen: ‘She’s the one who had cancer’? I was asked to update my online work profile picture recently because some people simply still don’t recognise me. But I don’t want to – a part of me just wants to look like her again. 

The other day was one of those days when I just wanted to forget about the 12 month time warp. My photo ID flipped open and there she was – Jodie B.C. (Before Cancer). Long strawberry blonde hair, smiling, clueless about what was actually important in her life, and clueless about the extraordinary way that Life was intending on flipping the table she was sitting at when she least expected it.

It’s like it all happened in a vacuum… I was gone. Now I’m back. I’m driving the same route to work (with a LOT more traffic), doing the same job (part-time) with the same people (mostly) in the same building (just with a new fit-out). The danger comes from allowing myself to clamber back inside the hamster wheel to start walking/jogging/running in the same spot with my eyes fixed at the same wall.

The kicker is that Jodie A.C. (After Cancer) has a very different view of the world, and it’s one that I’m forever grateful for that I would not have ‘but for’ cancer. Like going from those old black and white 20-tonne TVs with the wire antennae hanging half-cocked delivering a fuzzy outline of a face at best. To now having a High-Def, 75 inch full colour smart TV that can probably make me dinner while I’m binge-watching Big Little Lies!  The change in view is beyond comprehension. It’s got me asking: Is this all there is? Do people not want more than keeping everything as it always has been? Am I allowed to ask for/expect more?  

I now accept that a disconnect exists between people who have experienced trauma or grief from a health/life crisis and those who have not. For those of us in the “have” group, we each bear scars but also silent strength from being forced to make a set of choices: Change or Forget. Accept or Deny. Conviction or Acquiesce. Resolve or Apathy. The tolerances long-established when we were part of the “have nots” no longer apply. Perspective and gratitude can be lost on those who have never had to claw their way towards acceptance and hope. For our troubles, the “haves” are bestowed the luxury of selfishness (my word for self-prioritisation) and time – we make decisions based on what we need, whenever we want. Let’s call it an ‘entitlement’ … not usually a favourite word of mine, but in this case, it serves the purpose of nourishing and nurturing ourselves, enforcing boundaries, speaking truths, and believing in all that’s possible.  (It doesn’t, however serve to justify the M&Ms binges that I’ve been indulging in lately... but that’s for another post).

You can’t plan for change – I mean, as a change manager in a previous life, you kind of can, but the key principle in change management is that it relies on individual ‘motive’ to get it across the line. The desire to want change. And let’s be honest – most people would absolutely avoid such significant change. Because great change usually comes from great pain. It’s not exactly something we are all sprinting up to the front of the line for….”I’ll have an El Grande serve of Pain, thanks! With a side order of Shit Sandwich.” And then the guy behind the bar says, “No worries, here’s your Change!” (just a little joke, right?).

On a serious note, my change plan for now is simple while I ponder what more I want from my world - to continue to believe the words that are etched on a small plaque hanging in my bathroom: May every sunrise hold more promise, and every sunset hold more peace.

“Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending." - Carl Bard

Plane perspective.

The different view that comes from distance

I’ve recently come back from a month’s extended holiday - the ‘big trip’ that I promised myself when I was half-way through chemotherapy. It was in part something to keep me focused on when ‘it’ was all over, in line with sage advice from people who had been where I was.  But it was fuelled by the knowledge that some much-needed perspective would probably only likely come from being on the other side of the world; the other side of my world.  It’s a bit like the whole ‘death puts life into perspective’ thing - everything ‘big’  suddenly feels so small when looking down from the window of a plane.  And once we moved above the clouds, I found myself breathing in the awe of possibilities and wonder, and breathing out the uncertainty, grief and anxiety and that been creeping in lately.

You see, I’m fast approaching Return-to-work Day after this holiday, and I’ve been almost suffocating myself with self-doubt.  After 12 months of sick leave, it’s time to dust off the work pants and heels and brain cells.  Only problem is the work pants don’t fit anymore (compliments of my own excess baggage from the  chemo/carb-festing/steroids/etc); the heels hurt my feet (continued joint pain/inflammation from the chemo and medication), and the brain cells seem intent on pursuing a part-time comedy career rather than one that requires analysis, memory, and quick thinking (the ongoing joys of chemo brain that hijacks my choice of words/thoughts and sprinkles embarrassment from random brain fades). Then there’s the sudden hot flushes/sweat-festing (also from the medication). And the short back and sides haircut where I once had long locks (the post-chemo do). All of which has led to my ongoing growing fear that I don’t look and sound and think like me anymore, so how can I possibly go back to work and do my job the way I used to? The way others were used to? The weight of expectation had been feeling as heavy as the jet plane I was in.

As the plane rode through the turbulence and the bumps and jolts gave way to calm above the clouds, I came to accept that I won’t be doing much at all in the same way that I used to. But wasn’t that the entire point of this trip; this much-needed perspective; this whole 12 months of re-examining my life and priorities? I may be feeling anxious about my ability to chair a meeting without forgetting my name and what I was doing there, but so-the-hell-what !? I had just run through the finishing line of cancer treatment. My life and world view had changed. The BIG things that felt so onerous and insurmountable before were now feeling ridiculously pea-sized. So what if I’m wearing flats and elastic-waist-banded pants, and sporting a military crew cut, and break out in a sweat in the middle of a meeting, or forget what I was saying mid-sentence.  Those things will be as big or as small as I choose to make them.  This time, it’s me flying the plane so it’s my call about how long I experience the turbulence and how quickly I bring myself up into the calm.