Let’s talk about … the paths we take

My life has drastically changed every 10 years. The decision to make these changes was mine. Leaving the job I had for another job that was something different was an opportunity each time to redefine who I wanted to be and how I wanted to live my life. When I retired in my 50’s, the path I chose at that moment was to live my life based on two goals – to give back to my community and obtain a Master’s degree in English. Both of these were long time dreams of mine.

I have now been retired for 10 years and it’s time for the next path. The past 10 years were among the busiest of my life in the best way. I devoted myself to nonprofits that help the most vulnerable and had my grad school experience and received my degree. Some of the volunteer commitments often turned into full time jobs for me. I’ve been happy and productive in a way that has made an important and positive impact for others. But I am not young and my brain and body are speaking quite loudly to me and lecturing me to slow down and frankly they are not giving me a choice.

So now I have to decide what is the next path for me to walk for the foreseeable future. I feel blessed and fortunate but I also know that the decisions that I have made through my adulthood have allowed me to be in this position where I have this choice. I realize that the majority of people, especially with the rise of fascism in the US this year, have no choice. I don’t want to take this freedom for granted.

After some thinking, I decided that I would select my future by looking back at my past. If I made choices through the years that allowed me to be who I am today, what other choices were available that were selected by people who I once knew? How did those choices work out for them? Can I learn from them, can I see what other paths are available that I have never been aware of or that I refused to consider?

I began to search through my memory and find names of people that I knew 20, 30, 40 years ago. Many of them remain faces without names but there were some names I could remember. Sometimes I thought hard and figured out an identity and sometimes the person’s face and name just appeared to me out of the blue. Memory becomes such a funny thing as you get older; it feels like another person is randomly selecting what I’m able to grasp in regard to places, periods, people, etc.

I looked up people on the internet and on Facebook. I am sure some of them wondered why the hell I would suddenly appear on their “People You Might Know” listing. I think I have exhausted the list of those I remember: former friends, co-workers, and other people who were stepping stones in my life during the decades.

Here are the lessons I learned from my search through the past:

Denial is a deadly thing. There were too many who were in denial of how their choices affected their health and they died too young. Many didn’t even reach 60 years old. Each of these people was someone who I knew felt that they could live whatever way they wanted. I have no idea if they ever accepted that actions have consequences. One person was extremely obese their entire life and another was a lifelong smoker. Both died of sudden heart attacks. Another had diabetes and refused to do what was needed to keep their disease under control. They had a massive stroke as a result and died of the complications.

There were others with similar stories. Each death that I learned about saddened me. I don’t know if any of them tried to change away from their destructive habit, but I know that they refused to change their behavior during the time I knew them. It also drove home how we can’t take our health for granted and all these warnings that people want to tune out are about very real things. Death is real and I don’t know if these people understood that. I watched each of my parents die and maybe witnessing death makes a difference in understanding that.

Would they say it was worth it to live the way they wanted even if they died young? All I know is that it is possible to find a balance between doing things you enjoy that have risk and taking care of yourself. I know for myself that I have to consciously make the decision to achieve that balance and it doesn’t happen without a deliberate commitment. Plus, the decisions we make about our health affect not just us. These people had children and grandchildren and I have to think that they wanted these people to be with them and be part of their lives. I have to think that those that died wanted that as well.

I’ve tried to listen to my body and understand how we need to balance activity and rest, “healthy” food and “bad” food, and all the options available to us. Every one is born with different challenges and capacities for what we physically require to live a healthy life. And, even more important, these capacities change as we age. I plan to continue to exercise, eat real food (keeping processed food to a minimum), get enough sleep and so on. But I know that if my body is sending messages such as “slow down”, I need to listen carefully. We can be in denial about aging too.

Something else I noticed during my search is that many women who had careers alongside mine in the past eventually chose a different path. Some got married and devoted themselves to raising children. Some chose different careers that were not as intense and demanding. Some reinvented themselves after their children were grown. I am happy to see so many women feel free to explore the options. Of course, some of these options were only available if they had a spouse who could make a large enough income to support a family. I saw this choice of different paths with many women of all ages, races, backgrounds, etc.

This made me think about what we are witnessing right now, how the current party in power wants to subjugate women and roll back our economic and social freedoms. This is a clear and present danger. But my search showed me that my generation and those younger than us have had a freedom of choice as to how we live our lives that I think was unprecedented. They benefited in every possible way, their children benefited and I suspect all these generations will fight like hell to keep this freedom of choice for women. I don’t think this battle has begun yet and when it does start, their fury will scorch the earth.

I also discovered that almost all the women that I had known were married. I am fairly unique in being single my entire life. Did my look back make me question that choice? Nope, not one bit. My journey has been uniquely mine and started from a point where I needed to find myself in my own way and timeline. I think those who knew me when I was in my 20’s would be surprised to see who I am now. But this was always my goal, to find the best version of myself and bring that to life. I made the decision in my late 20’s to remain single and it has been one of the best decisions I have made. I hope that those I looked up feel that way about their decisions as well and, really, that is the greatest blessing I can wish for them.

The most important thing I have learned from this process is that I need to completely redefine my expectations of myself. I forgot how much I have evolved over the past 40+ years. I forgot who I was when I started my adult life and how much I have grown and learned and matured and achieved. I forgot the damage in myself that I have healed and the enormous obstacles I jumped over to do that healing. I forgot the child, the teenager, the young adult that I used to be and who was so desperate to achieve. But that need to achieve never ended, it was still in me and now I need to let that go.

To accomplish what I did during my working life gave me my greatest joy. I thrived on that joy but what I didn’t realize until now was that sense of achievement became my identity. I couldn’t see myself without that productivity, I only wanted to “exceed expectations”, to quote a common phrase from job performance reviews.

Life is stressful and much of that stress is beyond our control. I certainly never worked in a stress-free environment. Yet even though I retired, mentally I still functioned as if I had to get a good review. I created my own stress based on that because that’s the way things had always been. What my life had presented to me as my greatest challenge was living up to other’s expectations of me because those others could and would use those expectations as a weapon. So I had to do all I could to protect myself.

My new path is going to be one without any expectations. After countless job performance reviews judging me through my adulthood, I need to stop the mentality of proactively judging myself to protect myself against other’s expectations. I will no longer be completing a performance review of myself. It was this process of looking back that made me aware of this habit and it ends now.

I will still be involved in my community and spend time working with others to make Burbank a joyful place. I will send letters to the editor to say what I want and need to say. But I will also wake up every morning with no expectations of myself other than to walk my dogs and give them love and treats, be kind to my neighbors and ask them how they are, and see what new documentary is streaming about a musician from my childhood (cause there always seems to be a new one coming out).

My journey to visit the people I knew in the past ended up taking a path that went right back at my front door, which of course is exactly what needed to happen. The only path for me that is the right path right now is not one I adopt from someone else but the one that organically happens. Instead of feeling like I have to design and choose a path, for the first time, I will just be.