I just accepted my first grown up job in nearly two years, and I am not sure if I am cut out for a traditional career anymore. So much has happened in the past two years. I left my last full time job in December 2010, lived at a yoga center in Massachusetts for the first half of 2011, helped my Mom through breast cancer, am still helping to co-parent my 10-year-old nephew and started yoga teacher training in the last half of the year.
In the spring of 2012 an opportunity came my way that seemed divinely led, and so I took it! Things that are too good to be true often are. Since starting my new job in June I have had my closest friends on speed dial. I called a dear friend in the midst of intellectual angst around my leadership abilities and she was in the ER suffering from a gall bladder attack that led to surgery. I dropped everything to be by her side, and created a tag team of friends to come in succession. A week later I was in her backyard bemoaning about being back in the saddle of a ‘real’ job again.
In May, I lost the last of the elder generation in my family. While away for that funeral sustained by the love and support of my closest girlfriends, I received word that my best friend’s beloved grandfather had passed, and then a month later another friend lost her father. There we all sat, memorial after memorial heavy-hearted, but fully present to support and encourage each other through our respective paths of grief.
In just the last two weeks of my personal career crisis I have done the following: sat in the parking lot of Whole Foods while my girlfriend talked me off the ledge of insecurity, had a good friend meet me for lunch with less than 24 hours notice and received a voicemail of such love and encouragement I will save it forever. Another friend gifted me, quite unexpectedly, with an expensive dress to wear for a big party my spouse and I had been planning all summer. The dress showed off my new 20 pound weight loss and she gave it to me just an hour before our first guest arrived.
It is good to know that your true girlfriends will be by your side whenever and however you need them. No matter how amazing your spouse/significant other may be, there are just some things that only a good girlfriend will understand. A need only they can fulfill to give you that internal boost of unconditional acceptance and belief in your best self. They see me when I can’t see myself and some days, I need that emergency light from my own seemingly inescapable darkness.
