Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Crimes to the Third Degree.
All this pain is about my transition. This, I know. Doesn’t make it any easier, but at least I recognize it.
Six months ago today, AngelSu told me that yes, some things in my life were being slowed down and prevented, ground to a halt, but it was about my own transition moreso than anyone else’s. I’m coming to understand that now.
Some people reach their late 30’s and start that whole mid-life crisis thing. It’s only a crisis, though, if you fight it. And it’s hardly mid-life anymore. If you’re willing to assess and change and grow, it can become a positive transformation, even if it feels like a crisis at the time, especially if instead of changing, you’re hell-bent on recapturing some place you were a half a lifetime ago.
It took catastrophic changes in my major relationship (my marriage and its dissolution) to make the transition in my personal relationships and what I now feel I deserve and won’t settle for less for—a man who loves me because I’m me and not in spite of it.
Since then, it’s taken big hurts in friendships to change the way I relate to people I think of as friends—and sometimes to discover that they’re not really friends after all. Some of these so-called friends don’t understand why they can’t walk all over me anymore, and they’re angry with me for changing.
At work, the changes have been startling for my colleagues. For well over a decade, they were used to Lorna taking care of things. Even while they went home on time with no worries, I stayed late, gave up vacations and weekends, worked double and sometimes triple workloads to get the job done when the bosses didn’t/wouldn’t/couldn’t provide the necessary resources. The work always got done. My little co-dependent, self-sacrificial heart took care of it, regardless. But no more. I spend a lot of time throwing work back into people’s laps now instead of doing their jobs for them. But I no longer work evenings routinely and alone, and I’m exponentially less stressed.
So now, the transition energies are weaving through my home business and the way I run it, how I often go out of my way to help other people, and how those efforts to take care of others, even to my own detriment, get me burned way too often. So while I’m upset with someone trying to take advantage of me yesterday, I now see this for what it is. A big message that it’s time to change and take care of me first.
I consider so much of my home business efforts to be “Goddess work” that doesn’t have to make me rich, but my guides have been bugging me for the past month to stop subsidizing and saving people and let things sink or swim on their own. Just let them float. You know, like the big publishers do, the ones who never spend a dime on marketing and don’t even bother to link to the book on their websites. As a result, some non-pagan projects are coming to me that may prove very profitable, and it may be that I’m far more discriminating in the future, particularly when it comes to fiction, even though that’s been a specialty. No more simply publishing a great story but it will have to be a great story that has an audience to support it. I’ll reserve more slots for special non-fiction, particularly in certain areas, and for fiction from authors with built-in followings. Spiritual work is not synonymous with “freebie,” and though I won’t cull anything in my existing catalog, I will take a different approach to future contracts.
None of this is easy, but it’s all little nudges to make me do things differently, in ways far better for me, to draw me toward a happier, self-sufficient but fully balanced place.
It hit me today when I stood in a hallway with people I’ve known for almost 20 years and realized I had nothing in common with them but the past. They haven’t moved, but I have. And they don’t like the changes they see in me. They preferred me passive, restrained, eager to fix their problems. That’s not what they’re getting these days.
What they’re getting is someone in transition…someone who takes a stinging like last night, gets briefly hurt, then angry, then says, “Okay, no more of that.” They don’t know what to do with me.
But they don’t have to.
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