An old friend contacted me today. We haven't spoken for years but, as the old saying goes, within a few minutes we were talking as though we never lost touch.
We worked together in the 80s and what I remember most is that no one -- and I mean no one -- ever had a bad thing to say about her. She went out of her way to make everyone happy. I entered the workforce wired the same way, but I gotta' tell you, she was a mentor for me. She'd elevated good girliness to an art form, and she taught me well.
We laughed about those days for a while...then she stopped laughing. "To be honest," she said, "the good ol' days weren't all that good."
She left the company in the early 90s, took another job and got downsized, got another job and was merged out, got another job and was laid off, and finally decided to go into business herself. In her 40s.
"It was horrible," she said. "I had no idea how to make decisions or how to state my opinion. I only knew how to make people happy."
She said she almost went broke because she never charged enough. (People liked her better because she was cheap.) She ran herself into the ground because she never challenged deadlines. (People liked her because she never asked for more time.) She got an ulcer because she never rocked the boat. (People liked her because she didn't complain.)
None of this surprised me because she was, after all, the Supreme Goddess of Good Girldom. But I have to admit, I was kinda' curious. So I asked her, as one good girl to another, how she turned things around.
"Badly," she said.
She wasn't joking. The woman with a Rolodex of friends now has one or two to her name. ("But they're real," she said. "I don't have kiss butt for them to like me.") She lost a lot of clients, and it wasn't easy to find more. She had to work hard to rebuild her reputation.
She's still an entrepreneur, but she changed businesses twice before settling on what she wanted to do.
"I had to learn a whole new language," she said. "I was like a baby -- or a stroke victim -- I had to learn to talk again, to walk again. I kept bumping into things and falling down and skinning my knee."
She's happier now. She said the journey was worth it. And when I told her about this blog, she offered advice for those, like me, who are trying to change.
"The scary part isn't when you start. Then the world is full of possibilities. You have a glorious idea of where you're going, and you have no idea how many will go wrong," she said. "And the scary part isn't when you're finished because then you've evolved. You've conquered something. You can look back on what you've done and feel really, really proud.
"The scary part is in the middle, when everything's a mess and you're all unsettled, when people say you're screwing up and nobody likes you and they say you're becoming a royal pain in the ass. That's when you have to remember that no one came into this world perfect. You have accept the fact that, yeah, you probably are screwing up, and a lot of people really don't like you, and you probably are a major pain in the ass.
"And that's okay. Tomorrow you'll do a little better. The key is to just keep keeping on."
Playing on iTunes: Again by Donnie McClurkin. Amazing song; amazing voice.
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1 comment:
Fabulous post and oh so true. Starting over is also like pursuing publishing. When you first start writing, you're so full of hope but somewhere down the line the manuscripts get harder to write because you know all too well the pitfalls and what doesn't work. You hit the wall and are tempted to quit. But, like any marathon runner, you have to keep going until you have that major breakthrough. That's where I think I am - needing to push on until I get that breakthrough.
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