If you can’t start your life totally over at forty, when can you? I recently read a quote that encourages us to stop wishing we were X age and start thinking of ourselves as old with the sudden opportunity to wake up in the body we currently have. And while I haven’t been pining for any particular past age or era, this new perspective is really appealing. If I made it to eighty then that means I’ve gotten through everything my forty year old self is going through so who cares how it will all unfold?
This week I was fired which means right now I am (temporarily) retired until I find out how I want to earn an income. And I will say this loud and clear – it will never be in corporate, or corporate as most people understand it, again. I will never do this to myself; I will never subject myself to the malicious and capricious whims of people who do not understand that work is not one’s identity. Neither my failures nor my successes are a reflection of anyone besides myself and, because of that, only I am allowed to determine or define what I consider a personal success or failure. I committed professional seppuku this week – I knowingly chose to kill off whatever professional persona existed within the tech industry lest my life (literally) and mental health continue to fall victim to forces and circumstances outside my control. Absolutely will not be doing that again. In the few brief conversations I’ve had with friends since then about all of this they’ve reminded me “well, you’re going to have to work really hard to get what you want.” So what? Was I not working 12, 15, 20 hour days just to get a kick in my ass and pissed in the face at the end of everything? Working hard is not, and never was, the problem.
So how did I get to a place where I put two companies on blast and then deleted myself completely off of LinkedIn? That would be a great question if I cared to find out the answer. I’ve deleted whatsapp, changed my number, changed my email and essentially made myself disappear. I’ve fucked out of everyone’s lives except for my core friend groups. I’m still working on rearranging my socials but soon those will be gone, too. Effectively, the person who I spent forty years becoming prior to Tuesday will soon no longer exist. Well – personally and professionally, anyway. Legally speaking I am still who I am (for obvious reasons).
So I don’t know how to even remotely determine what I want to do going forward. Who do I want to be when I grow up? With this blessing of truly getting to start over – and I’m doing that in almost every sense of the word possible – where do I start?