The Life You Built Around the Job (And Never Chose)

We had finally settled in a new state with new friends, new schools, and a rhythm to our days that had taken two years to build. And then in one afternoon, a truck going 60 didn't stop at a light, and my husband and my youngest son were in the car when it hit them.

They both ended up alive but in the hospital. My son was only four at the time and by some grace walked away with only minor injuries because of his car seat. My husband wasn't so lucky and sustained serious injuries. In the space of one afternoon, we went from a two income household to one, with no way to know if that would ever change back.

I didn't get a season to process it. COVID arrived not long after, and the math of our life, the one we'd so carefully built around both of us working and my career, stopped working overnight. I had to rebuild everything which meant another new state, a move to more remote work. A completely different shape to life for our family.

I didn't have a name for what I was doing then. I just knew I had to locate exactly where we actually stood, no performing, no pretending, just the reality before I could figure out what came next.

What I've learned is that the moments we're least prepared for are rarely the ones we saw coming. We spend so much energy imagining the layoff, the reorg, the AI tool that might make us obsolete, that we build almost no capacity for the version of "by force" that has nothing to do with our career at all. A truck. A diagnosis. A natural disaster. A phone call. And suddenly the life you built around two incomes, one identity, one steady rhythm, has to be rebuilt from a completely different set of facts, on no notice, with everyone depending on you to figure it out.

Here's the part I didn't expect. The skill that got us through that season of life wasn't resilience in the way people usually mean it. It was the willingness to get brutally honest about where we actually stood, not where I wished we stood, before making a single decision. That honest accounting of what really mattered, done first, before any plan, is the only thing that made the rebuilding possible instead of chaotic.

You don't get to choose whether life hands you the by force moment. You only get to choose how honestly you look at it when it arrives.

One Thing This Week: What's the number, conversation, or fact you're currently avoiding checking? The most honest thing you can do for yourself is to sit with the reality of the situation before it becomes chaotic.  Hope alone won't get you to an outcome.  Take stock - do the accounting first, then the plan, it' the first step that matters the most for you to reach something you not only live with but be proud of.

🩵 One Thing I'm Loving: Using a Decision Journal. Made popular Farnam Street, the concept is quite simple. I actually use a leather bound blank journal I purchased on Amazon. The basic premise is that  before you decide anything, you write down: the situation, your mental/physical state, what you expect to happen, and your confidence level on the outcome and what the decision is. Then weeks or months later, you go back and check what you wrote against what actually happened. It's a great reflection tool and helps you to improve your judgement and decision making skills.

Building a life around a career or who you thought you were supposed to become isn't a failure of judgment. It's just what happens when nobody hands you a blueprint and asks you to check it regularly against what you actually want or value most. I'm not sure any of us gets that blueprint in advance. I think we just get moments, sometimes quiet ones, sometimes forced ones, where we're finally allowed to look at what we built and ask if it still fits for the future we want.

Warmly,

Heather

Anchored in Possibility™ | The future belongs to those who know who they are when everything changes.