A Resilient Perseverance: When it’s Time to Start Over

In my twenties, I drew a firm line against a guy who bought his grandmother’s house, and said, “It’s already decorated.” I visited to confirm that yes, it does look like a woman in her nineties lives there, except for the gym in the basement.

I drew a firm line against a guy who had kids because they should always come first, and I’m not prepared to settle for second so easily. Another firm line was drawn against people who saw me as an opportunity to make their lives better, without a care for reciprocation.

Slowly, facts came to light, as I realized, far deeper into the relationship, that this guy had kids, business partners and priorities that would make coming second a dream. More, he bought his grandfather’s house that was decorated by his mother who visited on a weekly basis to “clean,” which meant to returning everything back to the way she had it – including the gardens.

At fifty-two, a friend said, “because if all you do is plant seeds and cook food, you’re a slave.”

I ended up right where I’d been trying to avoid. Like when you are about to lose your balance, and you fall to the wrong side, off whatever edge you’d been on, smack into that mudpuddle.

This slave revelation was not news. At first, the joke was that I was not a housewife, because we were not married. “Houseslave,” I thought of it as a joke, because I had it so good.

Slowly, I realized I did not. I did not have the freedoms, rights, and protections provided by the law under the label “wife.”

Actively Changing the Ending

Watching “The Housemaid,” I realized that having it good can be offset pretty quickly and easily. It ends with them, I thought, when I watched it. When I watched “It Ends with Us,” I thought, “Yeah, right, without even the conviction of the drunk who goes right back to drinking hours later.”

Having identified a problem to solve, I pointed out the available options and left him to his choice. With the “Spring” deadline come and gone and nothing done, house shopping commenced.

Walking through the house of my future home, the window trim lay haphazardly on the floor. “I don’t know how long it’s been like that,” my realtor said.

“Oh, if he’s anything like my boyfriend, ten years,” I suggested, knowing that he’d been living there for ten years. Ten years without installing knobs on the kitchen cabinets, without replacing a light bulb, without vacuuming a single cobweb.

Just like my whole life. I recognized a situation that felt familiar, and felt the urge to fix it, and the confidence that I could make it happen. More, it gave me options to start over. While I could still scuttle it all in the future, I could also maintain a friendship from a comfortable distance. I could end up with a property to rent, a property to sell, or simply a property that is my own safe haven.

To me, resiliency is not somewhere you stay. It’s not a superpower you own, but one you use, as you transmute pain into wisdom.

Pushing Hard Against Failure

To start over is not simply always forward. It’s simply physics. Like being in space, you can’t move forward without pushing against something. Failure is your opportunity to push against. Success is the measure of how hard you were able to do that, because going up, against gravity, takes much effort, and it’s effort I admire, the transmuting of the pain into wisdom.

How high can you get?

If life, like progress, is simply a endless spiral of planning, doing, checking, and acting, it’s a world of conceptualizing an experiment, executing that experiment, learning from the outcomes of it, and using that new knowledge to update and correct what you were previously doing.

Then the bottom part of that curve is resilience and the upper part is perseverance. You go, go, go, until the old ways tarnish, wear out, or otherwise stop working as well. Then, failure strikes. You cross the line and now you must be resilient.

To be resilient is to accept the failure and work through the grief of it. The grief is the process of anger, negotiation, denial, rejection, and other complex emotions as those intertwine to attempt to point out the realization you need to know. Once you see it and accept it, you are back in the game of going after what you want.

Your compass might change. Or your strategy, your tactics, your reason why. It’s powerful to spend the time. It’s a superpower to learn everything you can before you start over.

Choosing Only One

When I met Lance A. Payne, I laughed, and asked, “Just one?”

If I can only pick one pain to lance, then it’s the pain of survival. I’ve proven I’m a survivor, and I don’t need to prove it anymore.

I still imagine resilience in my wake.

I’ll remember how to do it again, should I need to. Written down, if only for my own future reference.

For if I persevere hard enough, I might last long enough to need it again. I know it will be an adventure. The goals are the same I had in my heart since I remember having a goal in my heart – to be an author and to have a beautiful, clean, organized house.

Playing house – that’s the game I played when I was forced to go play outside. I’d lay out floor plans, and go through motions of daily life. Playing indoors, even while playing outside. Today, I am strong, smarter, and braver when I play outside, and smarter, stronger, and braver when playing house.

For it’s a fun game to play, especially when you don’t have to imagine the walls. Imagination is survival. To thrive is to have it tangibly, solidly, and clearly show up in real life the same way that you had it in your head.

Since I’m done with surviving and I’ve moved into thriving mode, I entered a writing contest. This contest didn’t take pen names, and I came to the realization that I likely don’t need it anymore. The people from my past who benefitted from the protection are likely gone, far from interested, or long forgotten me.

And so, just like that, I’m back to me to start over.

I’m crossing that line from resilience to perseverance, from survival to thrival (? I know, it’s not a word, but trust me, it’s a thing), from retirement and retreat to dedication and direction. To start over like a Gayheart.

Like Gayheart and Dane, to start over with the audacity to craft a relationship as you see fit, rather than a black or white choice: married or not? In the end, they were married but not together; best friends to the end.

Just like a twenty-year-old, but without the naivety, pressure, and ignorance that I didn’t know I had then. I may not win a writing contest this year, but I’ll keep trying. Trying and trying, like someone with nothing to prove and all her time in the world to do it.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned about writing, it’s that it must be edited to be worthy, and that editor needs a direction. What are you aiming for here? Is this true or not, and is it personal or universal?

If it’s universal, then before a sentence is written, you must prove why you should be the one to write it. Because, frankly, if it’s nonfiction and we have a writer we like, we’ll simply take your proposal and have them do it.

What if it’s personal and as true as it can be when documented from memories, and who cares if anyone else lived or remembered it differently, if all the major facts are in place? If that narrative incorporates scientific experiments, institutionalized learning, and professional experience? What is the line between nonfiction and personal memoir?

To Be Profound

Not just any writer. I wanted to be known for being profound. Maybe I noticed that when you hardly speak, people listen when you do. With my delayed onset of speech, I can only imagine all the faces that would have been pointed at me, waiting to hear me speak. Me, not my older sister or younger brother. Attention, mine.

It’s all about getting attention, isn’t it? Actually, it’s about getting control, approval, and validation instead of or as well. Figuring out how to get faces pointed on mass seems to be a control-seeking behaviour. Those who are simply given control don’t have to seek it.

When I was among the winners in Better Homes and Gardens’ contest to define luxury, I thought I was being profound. “Luxury is silence and peace brought on by lack of worry.” Today I know that experience of luxury, while also knowing how keen the mind is to find a future concern that needs avoiding. Worrying is a choice; determining what future outcomes may occur and deciding what to do about it now, should it happen, is simply risk avoidance.

I’m risk adverse. I used to be a worrier. I used to be a complainer, and then someone asked me, “Well what are you going to do about it?”

This question, from someone whose nickname was Captain, has been my operating principle, my sole source of motivation as I ask myself this routinely, both to set my strategy and to refine my tactics when they need it.

Not a damsel waiting to be rescued. Not a parishioner waiting for divine intervention. From this, my manager, I was also not a worker in need of permission.

To Be Empowered

Much later, I learned the word “empowerment” in my career, from people struggling to define it, to identify it, and to explain what it looked like, all the while knowing I was more hemmed in by culture and expectations than ever in my career.

I went from, “How come those two are always together?” to, “There’s no way you are going alone.” From individual traceability to, “I love it here because you can never get fired for anything you do, because everything is group work.”

Today I know, they can fire the entire team, department, division, and if they don’t, everyone could lose their jobs as entire companies and industries go under. Group work is painful, slow, and the safest way to get anything done, if done is all it gets.

Those two were always together because we balanced out the needs. He was the unionized employee, and I was the resident engineer. What I wasn’t allowed to touch and wasn’t supposed to know how to do, he did, and vice versa. I could have spent half the day securing assistance the right way, as could he. Instead, we shared an office and finally said, “How about we do my project in the morning and yours in the afternoon?”

Just like that, a perfect truce, or partnership, was born. When new leadership came on board and suspected other reasons why we were always together, I was forced to go back to the old, slow ways. I couldn’t do it, and I decided to take the best job I could find before my vacation time (spent on interviews) ran out. I did ask if I could fix those ways first, and was denied. “They are corporate,” I was told. Way above my head.

To Be Heard

At what age will appearance stop mattering first, foremost, and final?

At 52, I have come into that world, that one of merit. There are writing contests where only your word is what matters. In fact, you can be disqualified for trying to get by on your reputation, credentials or status.

Now that’s a world in which I want to immerse myself. Time spent learning the rules, understanding the expectations, practicing the craft, and refining the art. Like my very own hot tub under the stars, at bliss with the cognitive dissonance of the infinite and of the fleeting dust.

In fact, I already signed up to start over. I signed up how to tell the personal memoir that explains the need to and the result of the research behind the nonfiction. I signed up how to separate out the personal from the nonfiction so you can read all about it without having to know a single detail of who I am or what I did.

Committed, I am signed up to become a writer by putting in the work, finding the readers, and hearing the feedback so that I can more efficiently and more effectively ensure that the message I want to convey lands as I’ve hope it would.

Now that is something I can measure, and the subject that I always thought was subjective at best, just became a science, and achieving my childhood dreams simply a matter of time and effort.

What an interesting detour that I’d love to tell you all about, as soon as I can, and know that I am spending that time making it worth the wait.