Permission

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I formally resigned from my counseling gig on Wednesday, giving three weeks’ notice, even though my departure from the clinic has been a foregone conclusion for a few months.

I’ve felt like a ghost in the halls, or the walking dead — invisible, ignored — and that’s just as well, because “breaking up” with my clients, as my beautiful friend [name redacted] put it in her text message 👀⬆️, has hit me harder than I imagined it would. I’ve been carrying around a lot of grief and sadness, and it seems intent on leaking out, despite my efforts to contain it.

When I got that text on Friday morning, I was sequestered in my therapy office, puffy-faced and sniffly after spending most of Thursday crying in my bed, and I didn’t think I had any more tears left in me, but my phone buzzed, and whoosh! 😭

Guess I won’t be showing much improvement on my final internship eval under “managing emotions.” My lack of a poker face rubbed them the wrong way from Day One, and while I’m never gonna be hip to the blank slate approach, it’s clear that this will continue to be a “growth area” — euphemism for “glaring weakness” — in my next job.

No, before you ask, I don’t know what that is yet!

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As with any hard thing we experience as humans, it helps to know we’re not alone in the struggle. I have felt very much alone in this latest life transition — no offense to my loving and supportive hubby or mom; they just aren’t in positions where they can fully understand — so I can’t express what a relief it was to hear from my friend. I mean, validating social media posts are nice, but it’s a whole other level of reassurance when a real human who’s been exactly where I am gives me “permission” to feel however I feel.

That’s another big growth area: I still rely way too much on external sources to assuage my crippling self-doubt.

So many examples of this phenomenon are flooding my head right now, but I’ll give you the most potent one. I was 19 or 20, and in the year after I quit the softball team at Northwestern and became just another small fish jumping headfirst into the big pond (hello, identity crisis!), I’d whittled my robust athletic frame down from a size 10 to a 6 with a combination of starvation, obsessive overexercise, laxatives, and a persistent, all-encompassing fear of putting on weight. My worried mom sent me to a nutritionist, who prescribed a meal plan that I interpreted as official permission to eat.

🧠: “If a doctor thinks I’m skinny enough, I guess I can give myself a break and put a piece of cheese on my veggie burger…let’s make it the fat-free kind…”

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We learned in one of our grad school courses — I think it was “Family Development Processes” — how major life transitions tend to expose our underlying issues and dysfunctional patterns, and the way we respond determines whether we evolve and grow, or get stuck. My life has been a perfect case study!

From the death of my childhood dream, that my above-average academic and athletic exploits could keep me safe in a bubble of love and approval forever and ever, amen; to the death of my teenage dream, that keeping my body small and thus “attractive” to others would fill the hole that academics and athletic performance didn’t end up touching; to the death of my adulthood dream, that numbing myself with alcohol would make the pain of all the above “failures” magically go away…

It seems obvious, now that I’ve finally gotten around to growing up: From life stage to life stage, I just kept smearing “lipstick on the pig,” trying to put on a good show, thinking I could build my self-worth on the fickle foundation of other people’s judgments. I was basically waiting on their permission just to exist in the world, let alone live authentically.

Like most “gifted” kids who grew up with a fixed mindset, believing the talents we were born with predetermined our identity and laid a concrete roadmap for a life of “being good,” I didn’t do the inner work necessary to navigate through the big, scary changes those major life transitions bring. Sadly, because I’d checked all those “good girl” boxes in those early formative years, I didn’t even know there was inner work to do.

I think all humans ultimately reach a point where two truths smack us in the face: 1) there really is no way to avoid pain in this life; and 2) staying the same is just as painful, if not moreso, than making a change. It can take a lot of denial and wheel-spinning before we get there, but we do get there, and then, we must make a choice.

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It took me until 41 to wake up and acknowledge that I had to go back before I could move forward. I had to identify, address and heal my core wounds before I could live out any kind of meaningful purpose. I had to understand who I really was before I could possibly fathom what my “dream” might be.

I’m still not totally sure, after almost five years of continuous sobriety, regular therapy, engagement in support groups and psych classes, and a lot of soul-searching — much of which has happened here in my blog. As evidenced by the length of this post, it takes me a lot of figuring before I get shit figured out!

But sitting here writing this today, it makes so much sense that I would be all sorts of triggered in this season of my life. It makes sense why I’ve found myself standing in my kitchen from time to time over the past few weeks, when my husband wasn’t home, staring out the window with that old familiar empty ache in my gut. It makes sense that I would catch myself fantasizing about what it might be like to go get drunk, obliterate all this awful uncertainty, and leave all this hard “growing up” stuff behind.

In those moments, I have wanted nothing more than the permission to just give up.

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👆🏻This guy gets it! I mean, seriously, if I really think about it, I’m going through the mother of all transition periods right now; the only thing that might compare is if I was becoming an actual mother. And if you read my last non-podcast post, you know that ain’t a thing!

In the midst of gearing up for menopause, I’m getting ready to graduate, at 46 years old, with a degree in a totally different field than the one I thought was my life’s calling when I crossed the stage with the other baby journos TWENTY FOUR YEARS AGO. Not to mention that this graduation feels disappointingly anticlimactic, given that a master’s is the bare minimum requirement for even the most bottom-rung therapist jobs, and those jobs don’t pay enough to negate your student loans, on top of the extra toll they take on your mental and emotional well-being.

Yes, I should have been prepared for the realities of a “helping profession,” but don’t we all wear rose-colored glasses when we embark on new passion projects? I enrolled in grad school while still riding the “pink cloud” at just over a year sober; I was gung-ho about 12th-step service, pumped to have some direction for my passion, and dead set on proving that just because I was an alcoholic, that didn’t mean I was a huge fuck-up.

Come May 11, I’ll be starting basically from scratch as a pre-licensed therapist, 3,000 client contact hours away from qualifying for licensure, which means I’m facing somewhat limited job prospects and earning potential. And even though I want to and chose to leave the office setting where I’ve been cutting my teeth on the counseling world for the past year and a half, I do not relish having to end relationships with clients who’ve welcomed me into their worlds, trusted me enough to share their struggles, hopes, dreams, secrets, and tears, and inspired me with their strength and resilience. I’m “thanking” them by passing them on to yet another new counselor, and I feel pretty guilty about that.

I usually don’t have any trouble walking away from people or places and never looking back. Playing the role of therapist is like nothing I’ve experienced before in my life, and I could not have predicted how deeply this work would impact me.

While going through that heart-wrenching transition, I’m simultaneously searching for a new job. I’ll be going from part-time to full-time, which is an adjustment in itself. If I take a job at another agency, where I’m guaranteed to have a full caseload, I’m scared to death I’ll be in over my head and won’t be able to handle the stress. If I can get an offer from a smaller, less hectic private practice, which isn’t super easy to pull off without a license, I might not have enough clients or sufficient supervision to meet the licensure requirements in a reasonable amount of time.

And then there’s this 5-year alcohol-free milestone coming up in July. I’m finding it to be a weird point of reckoning. A potential danger zone. It’s enough time for the “obsession to be lifted,” as they say in AA, but it’s also enough time to forget just how soul-suckingly destructive the obsession was, when I allowed myself permission to indulge it.

Forgetting is something we folks in recovery can NOT afford to do. It can be deadly. It’s definitely avoidable. And I’d be a fool not to recognize the ample supply of relevant memories packed into my hippocampus that I can bring out and use in this moment.

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I have a history of resilience; there’s no denying that. I’ve made it through several other job changes, periods of unemployment, family deaths and health scares, an entire graduate program (with a 4.0 GPA so far!), a starter job as a therapist, COVID, IBS, and the hormonal insanity of mother-effing perimenopause, all while skillfully maintaining my abstinence from alcohol and utilizing my lived experience and counseling education to “pay it forward” to recovering addicts like me.

My counseling work thus far might not be earth-shattering, but it has definitely been meaningful. I know I’ve made a difference for my clients; after all, even the smallest gesture from someone who cares can create ripples of positive change, like my friend sending a text to lift my spirits because she understands my struggle.

If there is one thing that I have total control over today, even as everything around me seems out of my control, it’s my commitment to recovery. My will to never give up. And if everything new I’ve learned and/or put into practice over the past five years is “proof of my future potential,” I don’t need anyone’s permission to feel confident that things are eventually gonna work out.