Life as I know it….
08 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
This week I have started a new training for my career with the state. “For those who don’t know I have recently been named for all intents and purposes the Field Program Specialist for the Aged Blind and Disabled Medicaid Unit for my region. I say for all intents and purposes due to I get to do the job but I don’t get to receive the salary that goes along with the job so they just call me “Lead Supervisor” It is all good though.
The training is on building Leadership Capacity, and since I am a nerd about learning new things, I am finding it interesting. Yesterday we discussed the phases one goes through when taking on the role of supervisor, Loss, The Neutral Zone, and then New Beginnings. Right now I am smack in the middle of the Neutral zone, and not only in my career, I guess you can say life as well.
The Neutral Zone is defined as “this seemingly unproductive “time-out,” we feel disconnected from the past and emotionally unconnected to the present. The most frightening stage of transition, the Neutral Zone is really an important time for reorientation “This is the time when we feel most anxious, most vulnerable, and unsure of ourselves. While most people try to move through this as quickly as possible, according to my trainer it is actually a show of strength to stay in this zone, understand, and accept the changes you are going through.
I have been here before and will probably be here again one day, for we all go through changes in our lives, some refer to these changes as seasons. I fully expect to experience some trauma to my heart for instance the day Shayla leaves home to go to college, or the day one of my children come home and tell me they are getting married, etc. While these are things we all look forward to, they are also milestones that mark far more than the actually action taking place, they mark time moving on, you getting older and the fact that life as you knew it before that day will never be the same.
This got me of course to thinking about the changes I have gone through so far in my life. there have been many, and when I sit down , take the time to think about the phases in my life, I really don’t even recognize the person I have become, for years ago, the person I am now and the life I have would never have been imagined by the girl I was then.
Case in point, the building I am taking my training in, the training I am enrolled in because I have moved one step further up the ladder of management, is the same building 20 years ago I sat in to take my GED. The girl who walked into that building on that day, never dreamed she would one day be working for the State, as a part of the regional Management team no less. She was just in there so she would no longer be “embarrassed” that she quit school. That girl never dreamed she would one day have a Bachelors’ degree, never even entertained the thought that she would have a Master’s degree. That girl was just overjoyed that she recently got a job working in the Pet Department at Wal-Mart. This was her “Dream Job”
Pretty pathetic huh? But hey, at least she didn’t smell of grease and hamburgers anymore.
Down the road from that school is the Krystal’s she used to work in also, still standing there, still looks the same. I walked into the building dressed fairly nice and looked around, wondering if the ghost of that girl was still lurking around there, did she see me and wonder who the heck I was, Did she still wish to be someone else, maybe even me? Did she think when she looked at the car I drove, “ I wished I could drive a car like that? But I never will, I wished I could dress like that, but I never will” When I was that girl I remember thinking all those thoughts when seeing certain customers come in. Longing for something, more than I had at that time, but never really believing I would have it.
So this is me now, very different from the person I was twenty years ago, and I am sure a far cry from the person I will be twenty years from now. You know what though, I really like the person I am now, she really is not all that much different from that girl proud of earning her GED, and her new job at Wal-Mart. I may not be quite as trusting as that girl, or naïve, I am a lot smarter and have more self confidence than she did, not as much as I should I know but still a heck of a lot more than her.
Yet the heart, the heart is the same, and I guess that is all that really matters.
