Following my catastrophic burnout, there was an immense grief.
Something I was not prepared for.
A grief for saying goodbye to a 25 year career, and all the colleagues, clients and some friends that I had made along the way.
I lost them all.
I noticed that when you are ill, after a while people don’t know what to say to you anymore, especially when the difference of who you were, to who you are now is so starkly different.
People stop contacting you.
I mean, what do you say to a person that has been in bed for 8 months!? I don’t blame them, I would struggle too.
A grief for saying goodbye to my identity that I had based solely on my career.
If I wasn’t a high performing National Sales Manager with over 150 clients and staff, travelling the UK and Ireland, then who was I?
A grief for saying goodbye to the big salary, top of the range BMW and all the other ‘trappings’ that came with the role. I realised that all this was part of my identity too. I know that that may sound shallow and vain.
A grief for saying goodbye to the Botox, Fillers, Lashes and Nails.
A grief for the layers that were starting to shed.
Saying goodbye to me.
A version of me, I now realise. And letting her go gently, with kindness and compassion.
At the time it felt catastrophic, my world as I knew it tilting on its axis, the panic and fear I had, of feeling utterly lost…and lonely.
I had an immense feeling of everything ending.
I grieved for all that had been.
Life as I knew it had ended.
It needed to end.
But with all endings, there is a beginning.
In order to begin, things have to end.
That’s the nature of life.
Acceptance slowly came, and it was with this release came new possibilities.
I realised that new possibilities would come ONLY if I let them. If I got out my own way.
Shedding more layers of what I thought life of a 52 year old women should be like, and asking myself where and who I had gotten these ideas from…a blog for another day!
But before my new beginning, I had to question my whole existence and the version of me that I wanted to reconstruct.
Build from the wreck that I now was.
Only when I had peeled back all the layers, could I begin again.
Then I could start to reconnect…
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