Last weekend, I celebrated my 37th birthday. It’s funny because even though it isn’t an especially significant milestone, this particular birthday has brought into sharp relief that I am a mere three years from my 40th. I went back to school this year after a sixteen-year hiatus. When I finish my bachelor’s degree, I will be forty; when I finish my master’s degree, I will be nearly forty-two. In and of itself, these things are not unusual. My therapist turned fifty in her master’s program, and a man in my public speaking class this semester was a veteran of the Vietnam War, so comparatively I am still young.
Perhaps some of the discomfort I feel about it is based on context from others in my life. By age forty, my parents had a sixteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old, had been married almost twenty years, and they were settled in their careers. Subconsciously, I always assumed I would have a similar path, and I have done anything but that. Being someone who spends a lot of time reminding others that there is no “right” way to do things, it’s interesting that I still find myself chafing under that pressure.
Added to the already-hefty contemplation inspired by my birthday, that it is immediately followed by New Year’s Eve, and that we are now in 2020 has left me considering my life and future on other levels. My friend Michael asked me if I was doing anything witchy for the new year and I replied that I honestly haven’t been feeling particularly connected with my spirituality of late. He explained that he’d selected a rune, a tarot card, and an oracle card to represent this year and what it holds, and my new favorite, a word for the year. These aren’t things I’ve done in the past, and I’ve long struggled with New Year’s Resolutions because I have trouble maintaining momentum on any major habit changes.
I decided to give the tarot bit a try, and so I did a quick reading using The Golden Thread Tarot app, which I highly recommend in no small part because the cards are illustrated in a lovely fashion, and the explanations for them are succinct and detailed. Since I have been struggling with how I feel in mind, body, and spirit, that’s the reading I did, and these are the results I got.
That felt like a full slap in the face, not least because it’s true. I’m left feeling a little adrift, and I have to put the past year—indeed, the past decade—into perspective.
At the dawn of 2010, I was married to my first husband, working full-time as the café supervisor at Borders, actively working on my hopeful career as a writer, and practicing my religion consistently with a small coven of six members. We owned our home, my husband’s job and income were stable, and while Borders was somewhat faltering, they had not yet crossed the point of no return. It’s strange to look back and realize that this was already, and only, ten years ago.
Borders liquidated and I shifted from retail to the restaurant industry. My marriage and my coven splintered, I moved into an apartment on my own for the first time in my life, I was fired from my first restaurant job, and I lost my grandfather. I got a job working for a different restaurant, met someone new, and began rebuilding my life. I lost my grandmother, which is arguably the most devastating thing I experienced in the past ten years and has been the hardest thing to recover from. That someone new and I had an explosive breakup, and I was faced with the harsh reality that they had been, in many ways, my rebound from my ex-husband. Ultimately an unfair proposition for either of us. All of this transpired by New Year’s Day 2014, and it is safe to say that my decade, and my thirties, started out on a rough note.
I spent the vast majority of 2014 in a drunken haze, feeling adrift and purposeless.
By comparison, the second half of the decade was a remarkable success. I met the man who would become my second husband, found a new job in a much better environment, quit smoking, quit drinking, and finally worked to complete some personal spiritual goals, such as studying the Temple of Witchcraft books and deepening my understanding of my path. At the beginning of 2019, I was newly remarried, my job was going fairly well, and things all seemed to be clipping along at the right speed. Yet, I realized that no matter how much I loved my job and my life, there were things missing from both and I chafed at that feeling. I wanted a career where I could integrate my spiritual path into my work, and that’s a tough sell in the restaurant industry.
Part of this realization came as I had jumped on the Marie Kondo bandwagon, watching her Tidying Up show on Netflix, and purchasing her first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, fascinated by this idea of clearing out my home until I was surrounded only by things that legitimately brought me joy. In particular, I culled over two-thirds of my book collection, which was full of incomplete series and titles I had owned for over a decade without ever once getting the urge to pick them up and read them. It seems trivial from an outside perspective but, ridding your home of items that don’t bring you joy truly does begin to shift your awareness of the things that surround you every day. It makes you ask why they are there.
In the spring, my husband applied to get into our local college to begin pursuing his degree. This got me started thinking about my own educational background. I took a semester off after graduating high school, and when I started going to college I changed my major three times before failing out and giving up. I had said for years that I didn’t see any point in going back; I had a dedicated career in restaurant management, and what would a hospitality degree teach me that I wasn’t already learning on the job? But, then I started doing some research into spiritually-centered careers beyond the idea of opening up a pagan bookstore-cum-magickal-supply-shop, and the phrase “pastoral counseling” caught my eye. More research followed this, and conversations with several friends, my therapist, and my husband, and I realized that what I wanted was a career helping people in a more meaningful way than bringing them a glass of wine or a plate of seared salmon.
I entered college as a freshman once more, seeking an Associate’s Degree in Social Work, with plans to continue on to the University of Illinois for a Bachelor’s and a Master’s, concentrated on clinical mental health. For the first time in my life, I have a plan and an end goal that mean something to me, not because of the promise of upward mobility or a big paycheck—as nearly everyone in my life is fond of reminding me, there isn’t a lot of money in Social Work—but because of the promise of doing something meaningful.
The future feels bright, so why is it that I am filled with this creeping frustration now?
I think another reading I did that night puts it into some perspective. Even as I am embarking on a journey into a more certain future, there is a great deal of unknown that lies ahead. I have a history of setting lofty goals, and then falling far short when it comes to achieving them. Going to college has the potential to be very different in this regard, because the requirements and goalposts are set out for me, and someone else is responsible for evaluating whether I am fulfilling my responsibilities or not. Indeed, though I fell behind mid-semester and spent most of the last eight weeks frantically writing to catch up, I finished with a 4.0, a feat which I am extremely proud of. Yet, with one semester down and ten to go between myself and my MSW, I fear losing steam in the meantime.
My physical health has also wavered a bit in the past few months, as the amount of time I can spend grocery shopping and cooking is limited when working and schooling full-time. As my husband is equally busy, we have both spent a lot of time and money eating on the go. I have not gained more weight, but I have progressively gotten further and further out of shape when three years ago, I was spending more time at the gym and at least gaining some muscle mass.
I also set a goal last year to read fifteen books. I read four.
So it is that 37 and 2020 both find me more motivated toward my future, yet still struggling with many of the same things I was struggling with at 27 in 2010. I feel frustrated with my body and nutrition, stifled by my lack of spiritual motivation, have difficulty reading for pleasure, and I write far less frequently than I would like. How do I overcome these things? How do I set goals and maintain momentum toward them? And in a life of constant movement and change, how do I adjust course around the little obstacles without losing track of the big picture?
One thing that I recently read in Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection really hit home. She talks about those times when we are just absolutely spent, and how most people have a “dig deep” button, where they find the reserve of energy to just push through a situation. I found that button for myself many times over the course of the semester, usually writing the majority of a paper in the last three hours before it was due, and often lacking motivation and inspiration until that point. What she found in her research, and what she suggests, is that choosing to do something different and relaxing can be helpful: “I didn’t force myself to start working or to do something productive. Rather, I prayerfully, intentionally, and thoughtfully did something restorative.”
In essence, I have to stop being so hard on myself. I have to take more time to stop, play, and rest deliberately rather than only when my mind and body can’t take it anymore. So, for 2020, I think my phrase of the year is “adjust course.” It’s time for me to get back to basics once more, surround myself with joy, and take thoughtful breaks. I’d like to see this year, and this decade, as full of opportunity, but first I have to take each day as it comes.
Daniel K. Sheff 