Sometimes You Have To Let Yourself Break

Pulling up in the uber I watch the building as we get closer. On the outside it looks exactly the same as I left it just over a year before. Concrete. Painted. Looming over you as you get closer.

I step out and slowly walk toward the entrance and pause just for a moment to let the sliding doors open. A moment to reconsider going inside.

This is the first time I’ve walked through this doorway since I deserted the job. The second time walking through not as a manager but as a visitor.

Ten years prior I was escorted in to get a tour of the hotel I would help to manage. I flew across the country to interview for a job with no idea how this would alter the course of my life. The first time I was so full of hope and excitement and eagerness. I was desperate to find a way to move to Florida and desperate to prove my worth to me, my family, my friends by getting a job I had no business doing but all the confidence I could. I was offered the job an hour later and moved from Arizona only two weeks after.

I didn’t know what my life was about to become. I had no clue that the universe, God, fate, karma, or whatever it was would mold and shape and contort and eventually break the hope and plans I had imagined for my future. Ten years were spent giving my life up to the company I worked for, the employees I managed and the customers I was supposed to care for. Each year brought me more money. Every few years brought a new promotion. And every minute I gave of myself to serve another I lost a minute I could have served myself. I forgot that I mattered.

A few months before I would finally break completely, I vividly remember sitting on my balcony at home, looking out over the intercostal watching boats go past. Looking across the water to the Palm Beach mansions. It was peace all around me. But inside I was twisted and knotted. “Is this my life? Is this all I’ll ever do?” I was horrified to realize that a life I had spent a decade creating was not, in fact, a life I wanted at all. I wasn’t enjoying this beautiful view. The things I could buy myself weren’t bringing me joy. I wasn’t sure what could bring me joy. There hadn’t been any time available to me to think about it. My life was my job and I gave everything to it. Those questions would stay with me until I would finally shut down. There was nothing left that I could give to anyone. I didn’t go to work. I didn’t answer my phone. No responses to texts. There wasn’t any thought of harming myself. I just simply couldn’t give even an ounce of myself to anyone. It didn’t take that long to finally let people know that I was okay but needed a change. And that change, once it was decided it was necessary, came fast. I was packed up and moved to Delaware in less than a month.

Got a job working in insurance. Stayed with a friend for a bit before finding a small place of my own. Quietly trying to put the pieces of me back together. But I knew that I would have to go back. I had left everything I owned in storage. Every month that storage bill came I was pulled back into my thoughts and feelings. A monthly reminder of my failure. I had to get rid of the stuff that seemed so important but that I had survived without for over a year. I had to rid myself of the tether.

I would have to go back.

I walked through those sliding doors. A place that looked so familiar on the outside but had changed so much inside. There had been three renovations since I was first hired including one in the year after I left. I had given my life to this place for ten years and here it was, so beautiful and fresh and changed and it had moved on without me. Survived without me. But I couldn’t feel bad about that because even though I looked so familiar on the outside, I too, stood there beautiful and fresh and changed on the inside.

I had survived without it.