M&M.
It’s sometimes hard to remember what it was like before.
Not just those before times (the ones pre-COVID). Even further back.
To before Santo Domingo. Before Nicolas. Before moving across the ocean from St. Paul to Brussels. Before marrying Joe. Before the trip to London that changed — or maybe just solidified my decision to change — the trajectory of my life.
{See related post: A good diplomat’s wife.}
And sometimes it’s really easy.
The calendar tells me that five years ago today, I rolled out of bed early enough to get to a recovery meeting before heading to the chiropractor for a quick tune-up so that I could make it to the office by no later than 9:30 a.m. It tells me that I’d spent part of the following week in NYC for a roundtable of women leaders working towards gender equality and pay equity before jetting off to Chicago for a weekend to celebrate a dear friend’s nuptials.
What it doesn’t say, but what I know, is that I was exhausted. Held together by M.A.C. Viva Glam lipstick, Excedrin Tension Headache tablets, and the hope that someday, somehow it was going to get better.
It would take showing up in the E.R. at absolute capacity and with dangerously high blood pressure exactly two months later for me to realize that “somehow” was going to have to be of my own making.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that night lately. Of rushing out of the office late (yet again) for a networking event while knowing with every fiber of my being that I just couldn’t. Of crying as I turned my car around and drove myself to the hospital. Of the hours waiting in the lobby. Of the Whole Foods takeout and magazines brought by a friend. And of finally admitting the truth when I was asked: I didn’t want to die but I didn’t think I could keep going on like that and live.
For months (years?) afterwards, I dissected what had led me to the damn-near-breaking point looking for anything I could have done to not get there. It took time and counseling and more time and yoga and journaling and more time to see what was truly mine to own and what hadn’t been and needed to be let go of. In the end, I realized I had stayed just long enough to know the very edges of my limits. It had been a painful but necessary lesson.
***
“The typical question is, Is this bad enough for me to have to change?
The question we should be asking is, Is this good enough for me to stay the same?
And the real question underneath it all is, Am I free? — Laura McKowan
***
Since that night in the E.R. just shy of five years ago now, I’ve gotten a lot better at skipping to the real question underneath it all. I don’t often have to sit in the discomfort of having to change or the inertia of simply staying the same because, 9 times out of 10, I’ve already been making some forward movement.
But I still find Laura’s question set an excellent rubric for evaluating and making life-altering decisions:
Is the situation bad enough that it necessitates change?
Is it good enough to stay the same?
Am I free?
We never explicitly talked about when we were deciding whether or not Joe would bid to leave Santo Domingo early but it was always in the back of my mind.
Somewhere along the way, right about the time that our household goods finally showed up, I had stopped running what-ifs and if-thens scenarios every night before going to bed. There was at least a little sense of normalcy and, even though it was far from perfect, I no longer thought I couldn’t keep going on as it had been. I was beginning to settle in and accept things as they were.
But when the surprise bid list came, it was abundantly clear (at least to me) that our situation wasn’t good enough to keep it the same.
These past eight months have been some of the most isolating I’ve experienced in my life. And of course I know there’s a pandemic still at play but I also know that it’s not been good for me that entire weeks pass and, besides conversations over screens, the only adults I interact with for more than 90 seconds at a time are Joe and our Spanish-only-speaking nanny. I have found myself lonely and bored to literal tears at times and it has been good for none of us.
But am I free now that we know that we’re leaving and know where we’re going?
Not yet.
I never got to the knife’s edge of my limits here. There were moments it felt closer than I would have liked but it was never so bad. Still, I have been dissecting.
I told Joe last night that I have been finding myself trying to conduct an M&M on an experience that’s not even quite finished: Could I have tried just a tiny little bit harder to make more friends within the community? What if we had gone to the beach more often? Would I have been happier if I used the rowing machine daily? How much easier to navigate would life have been if I had put more effort into improving my Spanish?…
I suspect it will still take some time before I am able to feel like it wasn’t a complete failing on my part that this place has never truly felt like home.
I’d like to think that, at a point in the not so distant future, I’ll be able to see what’s mine to own and what I need to let go of. That perhaps even further on down the road, I’ll be able to look back and know that I was here for a reason.
And that, even if painful, the lessons learned will all have been necessary.
