Putting Words Around 2023

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice.” T.S. Eliot

Last year’s words:

Sorrow, despair, pain, hurt, fear, longing, anguish, doubt, anger, tears. Lots and lots of tears.

Strength, power, beauty, growth, pride, intuition, transformation, self- trust, self-love. 

It’s New Year’s Day 2024, and I feel the need to put words around 2023 and what it meant to me. In all of my 44 years in this body, never have I had such a transformative year. 2023 was a year of loss, transition, and change. Literally, one year ago today, I drove away from our family home with my two children and spent our first night in the Tiny House, a small rental I had found for the kids and I until our new house would be ready. Then, four months after that, I decided to step away from the healthcare technology business I had helped build since November of 2015. In the first four months of 2023, I went from having a spouse and a family unit, along with an impressive job title and a business I loved, to being completely alone 50% of the time.

The fear and anxiety that crept in at times was almost debilitating. The pain of not being with my children 100% of the time and feeling like I had failed them as a mom brought me to my knees sobbing countless times. I was consumed by doubt about my decisions, loneliness of solo nights, and the pain I allowed myself to finally feel. It was heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, and hands down the hardest thing I have ever been through.

But it was important that I went through it, that I didn’t try to escape it. 

Despite being a shell of myself, my practical head was rushing me to find work, running into overdrive worrying about my future stability and comfort, wrought with fear about things I needn’t yet worry about.

You need to figure out your next career move ASAP. 

What if you can’t afford the house you’re planning to live in with your kids. 

You are going to lose your “edge” being out of your co-CEO role for too long. 

My gut and my heart were trying to tell me it was okay; to rest, sit with it, be still. That I was okay exactly where I was at that moment and that I didn’t need to rush into my next move.

That experience – the discordance of my head and heart – opened my eyes to two things: 1) how deeply rooted (and unhealthy) my familial patterning is, and 2) how I had allowed my brain to overtake my heart and guttural instincts for a very long time. It was at this time that I realized I had so much more work to do on myself before I was ready for anything close to a new career move, or even more unimaginable…dating. 

And so I sat. I sat in stillness, in meditation. I rested, and I recuperated. I began to heal years of fight/flight/freeze vagal responses, and allowed my nervous system to reset. I took my dogs on long walks. I began regularly exercising again, something I have always loved but had not prioritized for years. 

Slowly, I became more present. I let go of my fear of the future and began to live in the now. Small fissures in the darkness slowly began to let light in. And through that light, I began to heal.

What’s laughable now is that I had given myself four weeks to rest, recuperate, and recover after I resigned from the business. At the time, four weeks felt excessive. But today, I don’t even recognize that same woman and can’t begin to imagine what she was thinking. At that time, I had no idea that I would spend the rest of the 2023 year examining and rebuilding my entire life. 

It was close to six months before I felt remotely ready to resurface back into the world in any way. Towards the end of June, I started to come out of my shell and slowly integrate back in with trusted, lifelong friends. 

The kids and I took a trip to Boston to see my best girlfriend and spend a long weekend with her family at their lake house. I spent the 4th of July with another best girlfriend and her husband in Stillwater, Minnesota, visiting her home for the first time even though she has lived there for over ten years. I took roadtrips with my kids, I took trips with friends, and my mom and I spent ten days in France for our 44th and 74th birthdays. It was beyond healing, and I am forever grateful to all of the wonderful people who supported me through this year

Through the stillness, through the pain, and through my now much more empty days, I began writing again. I filled journals with my sorrow, but also with my hope and excitement for the lessons I was learning. And then, and I don’t even know why, I started writing blog-like content. 

As I wrote, a long-lost enthusiasm for life began to rekindle inside me, and, after much prompting from a spiritual mentor and friend, a book began pouring out of me. In all honesty, I didn’t even know what I had written most of the time. It was like I would go into a trance each day I wrote, and my fingers filled the pages with the words spilling from my heart. I loved the time spent, and remember thinking one day, “I could do this the rest of my life and be happy.” 

In addition to writing, I “did the work.” I know it sounds like a meme, but I saw a therapist regularly, I opened my heart to healers, and I allowed myself to unwind the generational patterning I had absorbed as a child. But just because I had become aware of my patterning doesn’t mean it went away. I still very much fell back into old habits and had to check myself frequently to make sure my heart and mind were in coherence. Because of this, my brain was still trying to tell me it was silly to write a book and that I needed to focus on finding a job or starting my own business. But my gut was telling me something else. 

So I asked for a sign one day if I was supposed to write this book. And no joke, just a couple days later, I got an email that said, “Have you ever wanted to write a book? Come meet bestselling author and publisher Samantha Joy.” Once my disbelief wore off, I knew this was the sign I had asked for. I went and I met Samantha Joy. 

Like me, Samantha had been in corporate America for a long time, very successful, but had an urge to do something else. She felt like there was a greater calling for her. So, she not only wrote a book, she started her own publishing company. Samantha is a badass, fierce feminine, and I knew right then this was what I was supposed to be doing. 

The name of my book, Unwinding Perfect, came to me while I was in that first session with her. Right then and there, I bought the URL and committed to finishing the book. I engaged with Landon Hail Press, Samantha’s publishing company, after vetting a few other publishers, and we agreed to start edits and layout mid-October.

It surprisingly only took about eight weeks to write the book, and it was only after it was complete that I went back to read it. That is when I truly began to understand what I had created. It, in its best form, is a memoir-esque version of my journey to find my voice and to unwind the perfect exterior world I had created that left me feeling empty and alone. In a poorer form, it’s a self-help guide to anyone interested in learning ways to raise consciousness and connect more deeply with oneself. 

It’s terrifying to think about putting this out into the world. But I’m okay with whatever the outcome is. I’m excited to stretch myself, to do something new, and to create a new path for myself, so different from the corporate path I had journeyed the past twenty years. I could fail miserably, or I could be wildly successful. All is okay.

As I sit here today, January 1st, 2024, one year to the date from when I began up-ending my entire life, I am filled with gratitude, with joy, and with peace. I finally love the person I am, without conditions or critical self-talk. 2023 was a year of metamorphosis and life-changing choices that have led me on a path to happiness and contentment. I am far from healed, but I am healing. My journey will be lifelong. And I will continue to follow my heart, just as I did to write this blog and the others, to write Unwinding Perfect, and to put myself out there in the most vulnerable of ways. 

My greatest hope in doing so, is to encourage and inspire you to step into the life you desire and deserve.

Divorce Identity and Loneliness

Almost six months ago, I basically upended my entire social structure when my husband and I decided to separate. Then, four months after that, it completely changed again when I resigned from a company I helped build and loved. I guess, “Go big or go home.”

First, I moved out of the home I shared with my husband and our two children and into a rental house. Ouch. That was tough. Like the most excruciating emotional pain you can imagine, knowing you’re feeling it because of your own actions. And inactions.

The heartbreak of moving out of a family home is something I wish for no one. We had been married over 15 years. Fifteen years of waking up together. Going to bed together. The constant of the kids’ voices and footsteps and movement. Day in, day out. Then…the sudden aloneness…the quietness…the stillness. The yearning for a squeeze from your kids before they go to bed. Being desperate to connect only to be let down by the mostly futile, quick, surface-level FaceTime chats.

I knew things would change socially too. We had built a life together. In our neighborhood, our community, with friends, and our children’s friends' families, we were always a couple, getting asked to do couple things. My ex is extremely extroverted and always up for a good time – the really funny and social kind of guy. I’m much more quiet, bordering on shy, and really only break out of my shell with the right combination of energy, people, and sleep.

So I wasn’t surprised when, pretty soon after we split, he got invited on a family trip to Florida with a few of our friends…and I didn’t. My feelings weren’t hurt. But I was sad. Sad because the reality was that I had spent the previous eight years building a business instead of true friendships. So when the time came for a multi-family beach trip, my phone didn’t ring.

I get it. I know my choices to prioritize my career often forced me to say “no” to social activities and not be as present in our friend group. That probably made me the overworked and overstressed wife who could be fun. Who used to be fun; but that side rarely showed up anymore.

As I began to prioritize the business, I slowly lost pieces of me. Some bad, some good. I lost the piece of me that was able to make time for friends and social activities. The piece that could imbibe and hang out late, only to get up the next day to do it all over again. I used to laugh. A lot. I used to have fun and could be silly with my kids. We would run around the kitchen island and dance and sing. Somewhere along the way…that all stopped.

As the stakes got higher with the business, so did my uptightness. I started drinking less (not a bad a thing), going to bed earlier (not a bad thing), waking up too early (became a bad thing), and filling voids from my marriage with work (definitely a bad thing). 60 to 80-hour work weeks became the norm, and I wore it like a badge. As a result, I lost my silly; I lost my lightheartedness.

Before kids, when it was just us, there was room for real, adult fun. We loved hard, laughed a lot, and partied with friends. But after kids, well, things changed. Crying, hungry babies came first, and slowly a crack in our relationship formed. After several years of not really addressing it, the fissure became the Grand Canyon.

We tried therapy…for a few sessions. I was over it after the therapist said that my biggest issues in the marriage were not my problem and something that only Josh could decide to address. I saw this as giving permission to my husband to continue behavior that deeply hurt me. We never found another therapist, and after that, I grieved the loss of our marriage during our marriage. So when we finally did split, it wasn’t the loss of my husband’s companionship that consumed me, but the loss of being with my children 100% of my days.

That killed me. The guilt is like none other. How badly did I screw them up? As two middle-schoolers, would they recover? Or crash during those rocky, early-teen years that are wrought with more complex emotions than their still-developing brains could process?

I remember texting a girlfriend one night, “Why did I choose to be away from my babies?!” (with sobbing emojis I’m sure). And her response was truly beautiful, “Aww Christine, you aren’t choosing not to see your children. You need to frame the choice differently: you are choosing happiness and freedom from a marriage that didn’t serve you and teaching your children that it's okay to walk away from a bad relationship.”

So as the weeks went by, slowly, and very painfully at first, I rode the ebbs and flows. Some more intense than others. But, they began to steady out, and we all just kind of fell into a rhythm. Fortunately, my ex and I get along really well and are very supportive of each other. We even went on spring break together in March.

But four months after separating, just as I was starting to get my footing in this “new normal,” I decided to resign from my business. After eight incredible years building what I affectionately referred to as my third baby, the company no longer needed co-CEO’s and, after much deliberation, I decided it was time for me to step into my second overture.

At first, I was on cloud nine. I was thrilled to have downtime – to wake up in the morning and slowly drink my coffee. Leisurely make the kids’ lunches and drop them off at school. All without showering and getting myself ready for the office. I even walked my dogs during the day! I was finally getting the much-needed downtime I had been craving for years.

And then…reality kicked in. Holy shit. The company had been my life. The people had been my community.  And now there was this massive, gaping void. Within a matter of four months, my entire life construct had vaporized. Where I once knew stability, where I once structured my weeks on kids’ schedules, countless meetings, hours reviewing financials, hiring plans, marketing…I now drift, a bit tetherless.

I find myself at this juncture. I’m not a wife. I’m not a co-CEO. I don’t get invited to vacations. And I don’t get invited to work meetings. I know this is one of those moments I’ll look back on and think, “Damn, the pain was worth it.” But the pain is real. I’m sad. I cried tonight. I went downstairs and clung to my 12-year-old daughter for comfort, who indulged me for a minute, and then returned to whatever it was she was doing.

If I were to rank 2023 so far, I’d give it a 10 on the 0-10 pain scale. But also, a 10 on the growth scale. And on the happy, let’s-do-this-again scale? A solid zero.