Transitions
“Just as one season ends another one begins, just as one door closes another one opens”. As I left the work site one last time, I decided to go talk to A.J to let her know. A.J was my friend and a very upbeat, kind and warm soul whom I had known for about two years. On this particular day I had fully burned out and knew I couldn’t go on working at that miserable place anymore. I approached her on my way out, “A.J, I’m gonna leave this place. I’m done and it’s time for me to move on” I had said calmly. “I just thought I’d say bye before I left”. “Thank You so much!” she had said. “I promise I’ll stay in touch”, “You had better!” A.J responded back. A.J then handed me a friendship bracelet and the rest was history. I walked out without saying goodbye to anyone else, even though I had some other friends there, too. Yet, A.J and I were connected on facebook and so were me and Scott.
That was about four months ago and since that time I have tried working at a different Amazon building, attempted to become a package delivery driver after leaving but then left that job too, then started working at an entry level sales position for a charity. That didn’t quite work out for me very well either and within a month I was gone from there also. From the time that I left the first job I walked out of, I had maybe two one sentence conversations with A.J over facebook messenger. At some point it became apparent that we were either both preoccupied with our own lives and had therefore moved on or had not been as close as I had once thought. I briefly took it personally as I could not understand how we could be on such a friendly basis for so long but then once I had left, become essentially non-existent in her life.
Of course after reviewing the facts of the situation in my mind more thoroughly, it occurs to me that by having left my job, the one thing that we talked about the most-work, was no longer something that we had in common. We did grow a genuine connection over time, like her being comfortable enough to share about the fact that her mother had breast cancer and me sharing with her about my past with drug addiction. Despite this, our connection was mostly on a professional working basis. We never actually hung out outside of work. When you see and work with the same people for long enough, there’s a mutual respect and bond that naturally forms. It can feel like family as you become used to seeing the same faces day after day. If I saw A.J in my local grocery store tomorrow, I would say Hi and engage in a few minutes of friendly chatter, but do so with the knowledge that we have both essentially move on. And that’s okay!
I’m currently going through a period of my life I like to refer to as “Purgatory” where a consistent set of circumstances and people have not yet become part of my new life that I am still trying to build. I am essentially starting over and from the ashes of what is old, something brand new is being created and part of the excitment of that is not knowing how it will look. Normally purgatory is less dramatic and obvious than it has been this time around, but mostly that’s because I have been the one to initiate the changes without a clear plan. I usually experience it as a smooth transition that feels more natural, as if I’m being guided in a specific direction from an intuitive prompting without working too hard to control the outcome, where I will end up or how I will make it happen. However quitting my job and making the decision to stop attending my previous homegroup in A.A which I had been going to for years, were what you could refer to as “violent changes”, like the act of yanking a tooth out of your mouth rather than having a dentist do it with surgical precision. Even if an expert does it, it still hurts but it’s planned, done carefully, done correctly.
Trusting Yourself And Being Willing To Learn
Sometimes you might get that feeling inside of you that says “something has to change!”. Maybe you’re stuck in burnout mode with where you’re at or you find yourself at another dead end road leading to nowhere. You start to ask yourself “Is this really what my life was meant to be?”. Questions start piling up and the urgency only increases as you search for some kind of meaning or direction. It’s impossible to know if the decisions we make next to alleviate those feelings are correct or if they will only lead to more trouble that we didn’t have to experience, had we just stayed put where we are. In my experience, dying inside is never an option and taking a risk is always preferred if there’s no gentle way to “guide the ship forward”.
Sometimes a decision I make at first seems hasty but when I look back I can see how it served a purpose, thus justifying my decision. For example my previous sponsor Matt and I used to be very close. We met in 2022 and started working together and going through the twelve steps. He introduced me to other people in Alcoholics Anonymous including family members and friends in Recovery whom I became close to. At one point I started attending weekly Bible Study groups at his father’s house every Wednesday night. This pattern persisted for a couple of years until eventually, Bible Study seemed to cease out of the blue, leaving me with nowhere to go on Wednesday nights. Prior to this I had already been experiencing fatigue and had stopped attending for awhile anyway, but the fact that Bible Study was no longer an option made it difficult to know how to keep any structure in my life on the off chance that I decided to start going again.
By this point, I was still calling Matt every Tuesday night at around six, but eventually I stopped calling altogether. It seemed there wasn’t a point in continuing to reach out since there was nothing left to talk about other than the same old same old. Then one day out of the blue after many months of no contact, I decided to give Matt a call to check up on him and see how he was doing. As it would turn out, he had stopped attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and started going to Gambler’s Anonymous (G.A) meetings. He had become addicted to purchasing and trading crypto online, spending thousands of dollars he didn’t have, which likely caused a strain in his marriage. Just before our communication had started to trail off, I had begun attending S.A.A (Sex Addicts Anonymous) meetings and got an S.A.A sponsor.
Matt knew about my promiscuity issues and had once sat me down to warn me that my behavior needed to change if I was going to stay clean. That I couldn’t stay clean while still living dirty. So he was already aware of my situation on the day that I called him for the first time in months. He also knew that I was seeking help for my problem in a separate fellowship. It turns out that by me choosing to go my own way to address a different set of problems I was having, I freed him up to go work on his gambling addiction. Towards the end of our working relationship (not friendship), he had already seemed to not have enough time to get together and was becoming increasingly busy. “I got the idea to get help for my problem from you, Bobby” he had said over the phone. He was inspired to go find another fellowship to address his issues in the same way that I had.
