I think the time has finally come to be direct and tell you: I am moving back to Asheville.

Some of you already know because I have contemplated this decision with you, asked for advice, asked for support.  Some of you suspected because I hinted.  If you listened closely, my answers had changed when asked about my work situation and living apart from Pete.  Some of you may be completely surprised.  I certainly was surprised when I realized that I needed to make this change.

I previously lived in Asheville for only 5 years, where I made some wonderful friends that I still have.  Unfortunately, the cost of living in Asheville coupled with my inability at that time to earn a livable wage left me looking at maxed out credit cards, considering whether I could take on a third job, and searching for homes I could not afford, homes that would not appreciate, and/or homes I never could have maintained/repaired.  Instead, I came back to Charlotte, got a significant salary increase, and bought my first home quickly.  Having Mom & Dad nearby to show me the new-homeowner ropes was a HUGE bonus.

Those financial memories left me thinking Asheville would always be a nice place to visit, but never somewhere I would try to live again.  But I’m married now – not doing it on my own.  And I’m an established 40-something, not just getting started in my 20s.  Admittedly, I could have made some better decisions when I lived in Asheville the first time, such as not living alone in a 2BR apartment and eating out so much…but I tried to make more money, and short of working multiple jobs, it wasn’t happening for me.

I expect to earn less money in Asheville than I do presently.  I also expect not to damn near kill myself to get the job done, as I have often felt I do presently.  Frankly, I refuse to do that anymore.  I am rejecting that premise, that requirement, and that is part of my motivation towards this change.  In an earlier blog, I shared a post by a widow about how “big law” killed her husband, and I talked about how the decedent and I seemed to have some similar personality traits when it came to our work ethic.  I don’t blame my employer or our clients or opposing counsel or myself for the late hours and burdensome work load.  It seems to be par for the course in family law (and other kinds of law), and I am simply done with it.  I know my boss works late at night.  I know he works on vacation, days off, weekends, and holidays.  I know he has tried to avoid having me work when I was scheduled to be out of the office, or when I had a family emergency – and I truly appreciate that.  But sometimes, in this work, it’s just unavoidable.  And I’m tired of being unable to avoid it.  I’m tired of making plans with question marks.  I’m just…tired.  And in the last 11 years at this job, I have set standards I cannot change now just because I’ve decided I want to do less.

I have enjoyed being a big fish in a small pond.  Further, leaving something I know for what is presently completely unknown (specifically what kind of job do I want?) is very scary to me, and feels foolish.  I feel that God is guiding me into the next phase, but as always, I would appreciate more concrete assurances of my complete happiness and financial security.  I guess, “Living with your husband,” is a nice start for a plan.  Pete and I have been apart since he moved to Asheville for his job in 2012.  We tolerated it because we didn’t know how long it would last, and because I had a secure job that I enjoyed and Pete had his dream job.  I can’t justify being apart anymore when my job does not make me happy and when it sometimes interferes with the limited time Pete and I expect to have together.

I am excited to renew my friendships in Asheville and sad that I will see you guys in Charlotte less often.  I look forward to full weekends with my sister and nephews, who always ask if we’ll spend the night – now we will!  (I look forward to full weekends with Shawn, too, but I don’t think he’s ever been that invested in our sleepover plans.)  I hope to find a job where I thrive again, using my exceptional office skills and also finding some “creative” and “social” tasks as my therapist has deduced would benefit me, qualities that are lacking in my current work.

I am browsing jobs in/around Asheville, though it is too early to really do any active applying because I will be moving this summer when my lease ends.  If you hear of job openings you think may suit me, please let me know.  If you know any paralegals looking for work in/around Charlotte, I will be happy to talk to them, and I will be honest.  I am not leaving because I hate my job or because I dislike the firm.  I am leaving because a series of events in my life spawned changes within me that have rendered me incompatible with my current situation.  I have great affection for where I currently am, and I need to leave that job in good hands.  It is too important to be done by someone with one foot somewhere else.

Letting go has been a constant challenge for me.  I remember sitting in high school science class, ruminating on something (that is my therapist’s word, “ruminating”), when a classmate told me, “Let it go.”  I probably only remember that moment all of these years later (1) because I don’t let things go and (2) because it struck me at the time how insightful this guy was.  This classmate who was outwardly very different from me had actually accurately assessed something I was struggling with.  I have replayed that moment and said “Let it go,” in my mind many, many times in the decades since.

This thought comes to me today for a couple of reasons:

1. Some of my relationships are changing in ways that indicate they may not survive. Friends evolve, sometimes in different directions.  Partnerships that were once well-oiled machines start to have grinding gears.  People want conflicting things out of life and sometimes it means they no longer fit together like they once did.  This is painful and sad to me, but I am working on putting myself first and not sacrificing my time for things I don’t enjoy just to make other people happy.  Sometimes letting go is just letting things be and seeing how they progress, and sometimes it is making a deliberate change and saying, “I can’t be with you/be here anymore.”  Friendships and relationships in general should not feel like work.  This doesn’t mean they don’t require effort, but you should enjoy them.  If I find myself bemoaning time I have to spend with someone, that isn’t kind, and it isn’t healthy.  If I am always the one asking someone to spend time with me, always suggesting dates and never getting a response – I actually am getting a response, aren’t I?  LET IT GO.

And jobs – well, they have to pay you to show up, and one of the reasons why is that you may not always enjoy it.  Fine.  But if you find yourself being irritable because you can’t shake work after you leave, or constantly complaining about your job…if the fire is out and you can’t reignite it…if you find yourself looking for gratitude by comparing your job to Deadliest Jobs or Dirtiest Jobs or some other far-fetched scenario just so you can convince yourself your job could be worse (“At least my boss never locked me in his office from a secret button at his desk!”), it might be time for you to explore other options.

2. Some of my relationships have ended. A friend unfriended me on Facebook and while this may seem trivial (and often it is), this is a person I care about and I know that this unfriending signals something deeper than a desire not to see inane status updates.  I am considering reaching out to her off of Facebook, but why?  She made her choice.  And this is something else I am working on, something I have been dealing with way back into my dating days (or days of wishing I had someone to date): you cannot love someone enough for both of you.  If someone has chosen to exit my life, as much as it hurts, I suspect that is not my problem to fix.  I have had friends who quit speaking to me and would never tell me why, even though I asked – repeatedly – and apologized for whatever unknown thing I did to so grievously offend them.  That wounded me because it was so foreign to me, but later in life, I had relationships that I ended without explanation because I finally grew wise enough to understand that some people actually never listen to your words.  They only hear what suits them.  They only speak.  Perhaps, for my former friends who dumped me without a word, they felt we would never see eye to eye and it simply wasn’t worth the effort.  I don’t regret trying to apologize, because I cared.  But at some point, I had to let go, because they weren’t coming back.

I have some relationships that I was forced to end with fewer words than I would have liked because those relationships existed in a professional setting and I lacked some control about what I could say.  I was considering reaching out to one of those people and then I realized it’s been 8 years.  That seems really silly.  That seems like it might do more harm than good, sort of like if I ever find the ex-girlfriend of a guy I used to see and send her a letter of apology.  “Hey, I just want you to know I’m really not a bad person because I slept with your boyfriend.  See, I was crazy in love with him and also I was super young…”  A good response to that letter would probably be, “Hi, thanks for asking for forgiveness for this sin you committed 20 years ago.  That would have been the time to do right by me – not now.  Thanks for stirring up painful memories.  I’ve moved on.  Too bad you haven’t.”

LET GO.

It is very hard to be present when you are fixated on the past and worried about the future.  I know this, and I am trying to repair myself so I don’t sacrifice the gift of now for what I can’t change behind me and what’s unknown ahead of me.  I’m not sure how good I’m doing since I’m writing about these old memories, but since I have probably counseled myself into not reaching out to them, I guess I’m making a little progress.

Thanks for reading.

My friend Ross has completed a very touching series about pet euthanasia on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/rosstaylorphoto/?hl=en).  I’ve known Ross since junior high or high school.  He is an incredibly feeling person, and I can tell in reviewing these posts that he feels every emotion in the rooms where he is watching these animals pass and watching their human loved ones – including their veterinarian care providers – grieve.  He talked about the paw print people sometimes receive when an animal passes – Pete and I have one of those for our beloved Zenith, whom we lost in September 2016.  We were not blessed to be with Zenith when he left us, but we were fortunate enough to have a vet who was also a friend, and we were comforted that she could be the one to send him across the rainbow, or whatever the saying is.  It’s a peace and a closure I wish we had with our still-missing Julius – although I don’t wish for Julius to be dead.  I wish for someone to find him and contact me on moving day as I relocate into a house, because I would of course then go to him and he would return to us and we would make it up to him forever.

But I digress.

One of Ross’s posts mentioned a friend who said she was with her friend during her dog’s euthanasia because she couldn’t let her go through it alone, and I remembered that my mom had a dog (Buttons) who had cancer and she had decided to have him put to sleep rather than have him endure treatment.  She thought treatment would be frightening for him.  I don’t think it was going to cure him, and he wouldn’t know what was happening, and it would just prolong his life rather than improve it.  (That kind of reminds me of Dad in the end, too, now that I write it.)  I don’t think Mom asked me to go to the vet with her.  I think I volunteered, so that she would not be alone.  It was one of my rare Super Daughter moments.

When Mom died, I thought it was the first time I learned to be unafraid of the physical presence of death.  I thought I was sort of forced into it, because she died and we were by her side and wouldn’t have been anywhere else.  But in reality, it was animals who taught me how to handle death.  My friend Nicole’s cat who got hit by a car and I removed it from the street so she wouldn’t have to.  Countless pets I buried, some who returned from the grave thanks to other critters who didn’t know or care to leave them alone.  There was a cat whose exhumation I insisted on just to confirm it was my cat (I hadn’t been the one to find him dead), and then I reburied him.  (Bless that stranger who humored me in the pouring rain with that task.)  Buttons and my cat Schatten, whose medically induced passings I attended and whom I hope I helped comfort in their final moments.

And even before that, I remember what most would call an “inappropriate” conversation with my dad about embalming at my grandmother’s funeral.  He was just explaining to me why she didn’t feel like a regular person.  I don’t remember asking…I just remember him telling me about the embalming process.  And I appreciated it, because she was the first deceased person I ever remember seeing or touching.

There is a stark contrast between a deceased human and a deceased animal.  It is less expected in our normal lives to see “a dead body” outside of a funeral, but we see dead animals all the time.  The universal pain comes with the grief we feel when a person or an animal we love dies.  How we respond to a corpse or blood or vomit or poop – all of that varies from person to person and from situation to situation.  I know parents who gag at bodily excrement.  I don’t think I mind any of it, but I also have a poor sense of smell.  I’ve been puked on, peed on, pooped on, bled on, and died on.  I don’t “mind” any of it – although obviously my preference would be for every living being to be alive and healthy.  I think I should have been a nurse, but God didn’t give me the math and science smarts, so I guess that isn’t where He wanted me.  I’m a helper, though.

I am comfortable in an office.  It is easy (usually).

But I am also comfortable with sickness and death – which is not easy for everyone.  Is this a calling?

How do I know?

Where do I go?