I am a big believer in the phrase, “Everything happens for a reason.”
I don’t spend a lot of time planning exactly where I want to be a year or 5 years or 10 years from now. I’m not a big fan of drastic change, so I mostly go with the flow. I try to be a good mom, a good wife, a good employee, and a good person. I hope that by doing the best I can in each of these roles that life will continue to be good to me and, for the most part, it has.
There have been very few bumps in the road for me, but there are two events that drastically changed the course of my life. Events that, at the time, I thought were devastating. In hindsight, it’s all about perspective but in your mid-20s, perspective can sometimes be difficult to attain.
The first event occurred shortly after I graduated from college. At the time, I’d been in a relationship with the same person for more than 3 years and truly believed we would eventually get married. He’d graduated 2 years before me and was living and working in Minneapolis, so naturally, I packed up all my belongings (a ridiculous amount of stuff for a new college grad) and headed to Minneapolis to be with him.
I found an apartment, a roommate, and a job pretty quickly and had just started to settle in when he broke up with me. I was shocked and crushed. Ultimately, what I felt was more fear of being alone than it was upset at the end of the relationship, but at the time I couldn’t distinguish those feelings of fear and loneliness from my feelings of shock and hurt.
I know what you’re thinking. Just another breakup story, right? But here’s the interesting part.
I’d been struggling to find a marketing job in Minneapolis so took a job as the manager in a retail store to make ends meet. Within a week of our breakup, my parents got a call from a small marketing firm in Texas who wanted to interview me for an open position. Since I wasn’t sure where I’d be living after graduation I’d used their address and phone number on my resume. Within a week of that phone call I flew down to Texas for an interview and within a month I had moved to Texas and started my new job.
That job was with Ivie who I am still working for more than 10 years later.
The years immediately following that breakup were incredible. My first “real” job, my first apartment and my first new car. It was also the first time since junior high that I’d been single for more than a few months. For me, it was therapeutic. I needed that time to figure out who I was without someone else in my life.
I will never know what life would have been like if that breakup hadn’t occurred exactly when it did. I can guarantee only one thing…that I wouldn’t have taken that interview with Ivie. An interview that has, along with other key events in my life, led me to where I am today.
About 3 years after I moved to Texas there was another HUGE event in my life that, once again, permanently changed my trajectory, but this post is long enough so you’ll have to wait for the next post to hear that story.
Photo Courtesy of Léoo.
