Chapters

Does your life arrange itself in chapters?

It's easy to see the beginnings and endings when we are young. School starts, we have our set of friends, maybe your family moves to a new city, we like certain sports or after school activities. So the chapters seem to align with growing up and progressing through life. We can make sense of changes with externals: we changed grades, or stopped a sport, so we lost touch with our friend. Our family moved or our friend moved away. We don't necessarily blame ourselves, even if we are sad about a chapter ending or a friendship ending.

When we grow up, there are still chapters that start and end because of externals. We move to a new city and get a new job where we meet new friends. Or we break up with a partner, and it seems like half of our friends go at the same time. Or we take up a new hobby or change careers, and the people we meet reflect more of who we are becoming.

So, going through all of those changes can be emotional. Sometimes fun and exhilarating, other times devastating and bewildering. But, there are always external reasons we can point to about why things happened the way they did, and this idea can lessen the blow.

Have you ever had chapters of your life seemingly start or end for no reason you can understand? Like life just sends down a lightning bolt, and everything catches on fire and it's gone overnight, while you're still trying to figure out what the BEEP just happened? (People who have lived this in real life with hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, wildfires or mudslides, please excuse my analogy, and I can not even begin to understand the devastation when an entire community is hit that hard all at the same time, so everyone is impacted and NGOs & FEMA must intervene).

That is a strong metaphor to describe the feeling that nothing is recognizable or familiar, and the grasping desperation we feel to connect and to make sense of things. I've had a few of these. A friendship group shifts for reasons I can't understand and suddenly all my friendships are awkward. College ends and my part-time retail job that was great during school suddenly makes me feel like my life is going nowhere fast. Or key long-term relationships I thought were going really great, suddenly, quickly end in betrayal, leaving me heartbroken. Sometimes changes have been even more extreme where the place I worked closed and no longer existed so there is no job to go back to even if I wanted to.Going thorough each of these experiences has involved me losing skills I needed to keep up at school or in my career, spending hours ruminating over relationships when I couldn't necessarily identify what I had done or said, or the moment when things got off track.

I think of those chapters as responses to internal changes. Sometimes we are unaware we are changing. Sometimes we'd prefer to not change, and stay with the familiarity and comfort of our old life--our jobs, our friends, our marriages. And yet, the world, and the people in our lives become a constant reflection that we have changed and they have stayed the same, or at least are not changing in the same direction as we are.

In these cases, so many parts of life change so suddenly, with no chance of going back to how things were, that we are forced to rebuild.

I've had a few of these very, very difficult chapters. As a teen, when I wanted a much bigger life than my friends were going for, but I was really scared and had no faith in myself. As a young person, when I wanted more emotional health and fulfillment, but that seemed to ruin all my friendships at the same time, for reasons I still don't fully understand. When I wanted a more fulfilling relationship with my spouse, and rather than therapy, we split up. And recently, when I wanted a lot more financial security for myself and my kids, and those around me were not as supportive or enthusiastic about my successful efforts in that direction, which resulted in overwhelming health challenges for me and major changes in all of my relationships.

All of those times, even if I desperately would've given anything to not have to go forward into the unknown, very much alone, and instead, I had to completely rebuild.

Has your life ever forced you into complete overhaul? How do you support yourself emotionally when you are going through tough chapters? Do you blame yourself and look for what you did wrong to cause the upheaval? How do you make sense of things and move on when it's not obvious what you did or didn't do to cause this?

Answering these questions has been my preoccupation for the last few years as I have sought to rebuild. I have learned a great deal about relationships in this search, and it will take a huge number of blog posts to explain. Some ideas we will explore:

~ Asynchronous growth in ourselves and others
~ Healthy and unhealthy responses to change
~ The life goals and 'debts' we inherit from our childhood family
~ Ways to understand life events when there is no information