I can’t dance. 
I mean, I do it anyway, but I’m not very good at it. I’m also not very good at singing but my lack of talent doesn’t stop me from doing that, either.
What it boils down to is this: I seem to do a lot of things I’m not very good at.
You might think the dance-partner metaphor above is about my marriage ending. It’s not. Not really. Ancient history, people.
My boss left me. It’s possible I was more devastated about that than about my marriage ending. (That would be hyperbole. Those of you who watched me go through the divorce know that I spent many months army crawling through the darkest days imaginable to find my way back to the light.)
Maybe this is about my marriage ending. Who knows.
My boss left me a few weeks ago and I tell myself every day that it’s going to be fine, just like I did when my marriage ended. I give myself pep talks and then I roll my eyes at myself for being such a Pollyanna. Then I reprimand myself for being a cynic and then I give myself the silent treatment. I have a complicated relationship with myself.
This post isn’t really about my marriage ending or my boss leaving me or my pep-talks about how everything is fine. No, really, I’m fine. It’s just allergies.
This post is about change.
Everyone knows change is hard. We hear it all the time. It is. In my job, I’m a bringer-of-change to others, so good thing I’m adorable and charming or people would hate me.
In my personal life, we’re all still adjusting to the change. I watch my children, they watch me. We’re learning to dance together on this new dance floor that is our life.
Every time the universe is trying to teach me a lesson, whether it’s at home or at work, I take a moment to figure out how it applies to other areas of my life.
Here’s the thing – we like our comfort zones. They are, well, comfortable. But change is inevitable. We change jobs, we move houses, the people in our lives rearrange themselves, new ones come in, others leave. That’s the hard one for me – losing people.
My boss left me. He and I had a pretty good work-chemistry. He was strategy, I was tactics. He tee’d it up for me, whatever it was, and I’d run with it. He was my coach, my mentor. Not the first and he won’t be the last, but we danced together pretty well.
For years, in my marriage, my ex and I danced together pretty fluidly. I lost that dance partner, too.
Losing life’s dance partners is hard. Sometimes it means we have no one to dance with. Sometimes, like when your boss leaves you, it means a new dance partner steps right in and you have to figure it out. For awhile, you may step on each other’s toes, apologize a lot, get frustrated. But you’ll get there.
Change is hard. I’m learning to dance with new people, and I’m learning to dance alone.
I’ll be fine.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Epilogue: sometimes big changes are disruptive. For me, when my life got turned upside down, I couldn’t write anymore. I have tried, many times, to write and it just wouldn’t come. It’s been bothering me because I like to think of myself as a writer, I tell people I write. And yet… I haven’t. Not much anyway. They say writing is like a muscle. You have to use it to make it strong. This is not my best writing. My writing-muscle is weak from disuse. But, dammit, I want to make it strong again so I’m putting it out there anyway. This piece? Eh. It’s a sky-is-blue essay. Who cares. But this is me, learning to dance alone. Thanks for being here for me.
