Let it Go

I resigned from my job today.

For the first time in over 20 years, I will be completely and utterly financially dependent on another person, and I’m not going to lie: I find it pretty terrifying.

It wasn’t one of those “Take this job and shove it” situations. No one did anything wrong. The boss wasn’t a tyrant, and the job wasn’t unbearable. But over the past couple of months, if I’m honest, I started to see the writing on the wall: The company was growing in a way that did not align with my particular skill set. It was like being on a date with a perfectly wonderful man with fantastic husband potential—for someone else. A date with someone who you know, deep down, is not the one for you. You can kick the can down the road for a few miles if you really want to, and it’s actually a pretty strong temptation. Having something feels a whole lot better than having nothing—until the feeling of guilt for inflicting the burden of your denial onto an underserving recipient begins to outweigh the fear of flying solo.

When I met with my boss yesterday, she basically wrapped a brick inside of velvet and threw it at me in the form of the cold, ugly truth: “You’re not a social media person.” Now rewind to 2014, when I was at the top of my game, overseeing communications for 7 YMCA locations, reviewing and approving over 200 mass email campaigns a month, and writing the company’s best practices for social media engagement and marketing. Back then, I absolutely WAS a social media person. I was really good at it. But that was then, and this is now. The world moved on without me, and, as I took honest inventory of my own skills yesterday, I had not managed to keep up. I don’t know TikTok or SnapChat. I don’t create viral content. I was struggling to just stay afloat. My superiors were willing to shift my duties to include more admin stuff: booking flights, managing hotel reservations, etc, but I’m not an admin person either. I’m not nearly organized enough. I’m a big picture thinker and strategist, not a minutiae manager.

So today I pulled the plug. I thought I would feel relieved, but I mostly feel sad, like I’m floundering in this no man’s land in the midst of an impromptu identity crisis, struggling, at 40, to figure out just where I belong and who I am outside the context of a workforce and the self-sufficiency of a paycheck I worked hard to earn. With my husband pulling in 60+ hour work weeks, the duties that fall on my plate are all things I’m really bad at doing: cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, corralling my toddler and working overtime to make sure he’s not bobbing for Applejacks in the toilet or rearranging the batteries in the remote controls. My new world presently lacks structure and a clearly defined sense of purpose and direction.

Don’t hear me complaining; I recognize the degree of privilege required to even afford me the luxury of staying home with the kids. It’s one for which I would have given my eye teeth as a single mom working full-time to just make ends meet. But now that I’m here, there are parts of myself I don’t recognize, and it’s dawning on me that, over the years, I had slowly allowed the concept of myself as a competent professional to creep into my sense of true identity, and it seems very much these days like the good Lord is refusing to allow my idol of self-reliance to stand.

He wants me completely dependent on Him and, apparently in this case, dependent on Daniel. He wants me to trust someone other than myself. He wants me to choose to believe I’m loved and not abandoned, that I’m worth more than my contributions, that I don’t have to perform to be loved.

And I’ve spent all morning boo-hoo crying because it’s scary for someone with as much betrayal and rejection trauma as I’ve been lugging around like a suit of armor to believe.

My childhood pastor used to tell this story about a little girl with a string full of beads she cherished as her prized possession. One night her father instructed her to throw the beads in the fire. Her eyes filled with tears as she reluctantly obeyed. No sooner had she relinquished the beads than he replaced them with a string of pearls. The moral of the story, of course, is that she had to trust him enough to be willing to empty her hands of a lesser gift in order for him to fill those hands with a better one.

That’s where I am as I type this.

My beads are in the fire. My hands are stretched heavenward.