How My Redundancy Was A Blessing In Disguise
The last part of 2014 wasn’t a great time for me. I was dealing with the fallout from being made redundant from a well paying job that I’d held for over 15 years, at the same time as my daughter was going into adolescence, and I was going into menopause.
After going through all of the emotions that were triggered by the redundancy, I found that there was an upside that slowly emerged as I moved through what I can now see as a period of deep grief. The upside was that for the first time in my life I was free of the shackles of being an employee.
And as I sat and pondered my options I felt a strong pull in the direction of putting myself through what I would naturally recommend to any of my coaching clients who were going through what I was going through at the time. So I put myself on a wellness plan that was designed to harness the power of the voice we all have in our head that can either make us feel like a failure by highlighting all of the ways in which we are not good enough, or can make us feel buoyant and optimistic by highlighting all of the ways in which we are absolutely fine just the way we are.
So what I decided to do was write a book about my experience of menopause in particular, with reference to the redundancy situation, and what family life was like when the safety net of a regular income was pulled out from under us. My thinking was that I could put the struggle I’d been having to feel well to good use by writing about the improvements I’d achieved by focussing on my approach to the fundamentals of diet, exercise, stress management, and mindset.
The thing I didn’t realise at the time was that I was going to have to build a business around my book to keep the family’s finances afloat. The long and the short of it was that after unsuccessfully applying for over 30 jobs I decided to bite the bullet and save my energy for more fruitful endeavours such as establishing my credentials as an author. In other words, I did what I needed to do to process the feelings of rejection, loss, and grief that the redundancy triggered, and then got down to the business of rebuilding my life.
One of the unexpected consequences of this was that I underwent a cathartic experience in the process of writing my story down for the book that became “Thrive in Midlife”. This came about when I was writing about the options I had for dealing menopause in 2014, compared with the options my mother had when she was in the same position in the early 1980s. The stark reality of it was that synthetic hormones were prescribed without a second thought in my mother’s day, and sadly she was one of the women who paid the price in terms of being diagnosed with breast cancer many years later. My mother was able to buy some extra time at the end of her life with the standard combination of chemotherapy, surgery and radiation treatment, but she was only able to buy enough time for her life to intersect with my daughter’s life by one year.
The catharsis I mentioned above came in the form of my heart splitting open (in a good way) when I wrote about my mother’s brief relationship with my daughter. This was a huge deal for me because there were a couple of traumas around the time of my birth that fundamentally shaped the way I experienced life right up until the catharsis. One of these related to the fact that my mother almost died from a blood clot that travelled to her lung not long after giving birth to me, and the other one related to the fact that I was the surviving twin in a case of Vanishing Twin Syndrome.
One of the consequences of these two experiences is that before I was even born I learnt to shut my feelings down to avoid the pain of abandonment that I felt in the first instance when my twin left me, and then again when my mother was absent in the early weeks of my life because she was teetering on the brink of death herself.
Looking back on all of this now, I feel truly grateful that I got my first real taste of emotional freedom when I healed the disconnection that existed between my mother and myself many years after she died, courtesy of the healing I experienced in the process of writing all of this down for my book.
So I guess in the end being made redundant was a blessing in disguise. It gave me the freedom to find some peace on an emotional level, and to go on to develop a business that satisfies me deeply day in and day out. I really love the work that I do now which includes running book writing workshops for people who want to share their personal journey and/or their professional expertise.
And I still love writing books myself. My second book “Weight Loss in Midlife: How to get out of the diet trap” is hot off the press right now, and I have another book “Mindset for Authors:How to overcome procrastination, perfectionism, and self-doubt” that will be launched in December.