Transitions

Ep 1:  Dori finds herself overcome by doubt and a good deal of discomfort about how to shape this new phase of her life. Cooking lunch helps... sort of.

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Transcript

In July, 2021, just after my 55th birthday, I quit my corporate marketing job at a tech company fueled by, I dunno, a pit in my gut that there was a richer life ahead for me. And now is the time to shape it? Yes, I was an early adopter of the great resignation. And also, yes, this makes me deeply uncomfortable.

I've never considered myself a joiner. I've always felt myself to exist just outside the conventions of whatever circle I look like I'm supposed to fit in. Bronx born and raised, Jewish progressive intellectual who loved to cook before the foodies came. Once Brooklyn stay at home soccer. Mom turned, still Brooklyn, tech marketer who danced then, and still, at house music parties, has diverse friends who are older, younger, white, and non-white, hosts potato latke holiday parties with a disco playlist. So yeah, I kind of feel like a cliche: privileged middle-aged white woman leaves an unsatisfying job to find her purpose. But I have to tell you, much of those overused tropes, that woo-woo stuff you've heard: live your best life!. Do what you love! If not now, when? Spoiler alert, it's kind of true.

Welcome to Life-Changing with Dori Fern, a podcast about the messy middle between when you hit pause and what comes next. I'm Dori Fern, a single empty nester in Brooklyn, New York who quit a corporate job at 55 on a quest to live a more purposeful? Exceptional? I dunno, happier life. I'm figuring it out as I go along.

But as my high school drama teacher used to say, the trip is the trip. I hope you'll join me.

As I get closer to envisioning how this podcast should take, a figurative dust storm swirls inside my head obscuring what I had just seen so clearly: the format, topics, whether or not I should interview guests, what I should do with the interviews I've already done. All of my progress gets covered in dirt I feel powerless to blow up.

I let myself be overtaken by doubt. Where do I start? Why will anyone care about what I have to say? I cringe listening to interviews I've done. I talk too much. I don't ask good follow-up questions. The dirt blows up and pelts at my eyes, but I can't look away even though quiet lies on the other side of a deep breath.

Or, I realize, making lunch. Cooking makes me feel better, but I'm not sure it always helps. You know how in movie and TV thrillers, the protagonist often has a best friend or lover who always seems to be there to offer comfort and save the day, but in the end they turn out to be the killer?  Lately, I've been thinking that cooking something I love to do so much and I'm really quite skilled at blocks me from developing creative skills in new arenas where I'm less confident and experienced. I let it do that anyway

On February 13th, 2021, I wrote this in my journal after a virtual therapy session: "Breakdown slash breakthrough. I must leave my job in corporate life. I can't be happy and truly fulfilled if I don't commit to moving towards the things I care about to make this move. I need the financial freedom to do it." I didn't have to cut the cord completely to make a big change. I know that. But the pattern of imagining, ideating, taking steps, hitting walls, and going back, it had become painfully habitual part of the fabric and the format of my life.

So for six months I plotted and planned. Thankfully I have no credit card debt. My bank account was more flush than usual with savings, thanks to COVID. And I discovered I could tap into my retirement savings without penalty. Once I turned 55. My remaining two years of college payments, hadn't entirely worked out.

And to be honest, this last year, I still don't know, but because I'm privileged to have no major debt and grateful to have skills, I can, I hope at least, put to use if I need to make money in the short term, I did that scary thing that people my age are warned not to do. I stopped what I was doing and started fresh.

I was, and I am grateful for the career, for the whole life I built for myself after spending my thirties at home with two kids and following my divorce at 40. But for the longest time, well before COVID, I felt like something was missing. Like I had spent my adult years scrambling and chasing to keep up with motherhood, with the cost of living in New York and raising two kids in an upper middle class, Brooklyn lifestyle.

Now with my kids mostly grown, I kept thinking about possibilities. What work did I really want to do? And for whom? Where would cooking and writing and creativity more broadly, where would they fit in? How could I be of greater service to my community? And maybe the world. Big dreams. Beyond work, did I want to live in New York, my hometown, the rest of my days? And well, marriage I can happily live without for the rest of my days. Falling in love again does have a nice ring to it. Making this podcast was always part of my plan. I knew I wanted to Chronicle this period of my life for myself and for others who are at a similar juncture and are curious to hear from someone in the trenches of change.

And even though form should follow content, not the other way around. I wanted to start a podcast for years. As a listener, I love to hear people tell stories. And as a long ago performer --I was the 1978 New York city storytelling champion, thank you very much-- a college radio DJ, and a lifelong talker, there's a pull for me to speak them. For most of my career though, I've held jobs where I tell other people's stories. On the side, I would come up with many ideas for other bigger, better things I could be doing and stories I could be telling. I'd make some effort to move forward, but then I'd give up when it got too hard and it was easier to stay uncomfortably comfortable.

When you have a job, your professional life takes up occupancy. As in it's your occupation. In space within a construct. When you create something from scratch, though, whether it's an independent podcast like this, or you build a new kind of career or rethink the shape of your whole life, you are your own architect. You must design it, find an assemble the necessary materials and, with the right help, build it.

If you're lucky, that thing will find a community of like things or a new community will form around you. For a long time. I thought I should be a chef. I even went to culinary school while working as an editor on Kraft foods digital marketing program. But now I wonder if this thing I love to do still, that's always made me happy, is where my professional future lies.

My gut has doubts. More on this another time. I never realized before now, at least not in any internalized way that in-between the things you do and the changes you make, that the feelings you experience are within your power to navigate. That with awareness and a degree of confidence, patterns and fears can be identified, discomfort examined and accepted, or shifted, without quitting a thing worth doing.

I talked about this to Jessica Burdette, personal and professional coach and host of The Space Between podcast about the difference between change and transitions. Here's what she said:. 

Yeah. Well, I would describe transitions as the, the space that happens between something ending and something new starting, and that in-between where the ending has happened.

And the new hasn't quite fully gotten going can be a messy middle. It can be the unknown space. William Bridges calls it the wilderness. 

Hmm. What's that William Bridges. I was going to ask you who. Uh, psychologist is that right? 

William Bridges is, I think he's the seminal researcher on transitions, at least modernly.

Um, he wrote Transitions. He also wrote Managing Transitions, and he did a lot of work with change management and working with a lot of different companies, just creating awareness around change. Like actual things, shifting companies, having mergers, things like that. And then transitions being the psychological experience that we have of the change.

So what's going on in our minds, what's going on in our emotions as we go through the change. And that's what he would call transition is what's happening inside us.. 

One is more the active doing the change and the other is the feelings and the experiences of change. Would that be a simplistic way of articulating it?

Or even maybe like the external and the internal, the external, like, these are the things I can see changing. I moved to a new place. I had a baby. I got sick. Those are all changes, but like the way we experienced them, emotionally, mentally, that's what he would call transitions. 

In the time since I've left my job, I've written a few articles about my great resignation or so-called gap year as one editor called it. And I've done a bunch of volunteer work with local grassroots organizations working to combat food insecurity.

I've taken lots of long walks and short trips, and I did a holiday season food. Pop-up where I made over 1000 potato . More on this soon, for another episode. I've learned so much about myself. And then again, I still feel like I'm at the beginning of something I can't yet name. But back to transitions and making this podcast.

On a recent day when the dust storm in my brain was particularly chaotic, I stopped working, cooked myself a nice lunch, and happened upon these right on time words from Ira Glass of This American Life. He says: "All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste, but there is this gap. For the first couple of years, you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good. It has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. Glass goes on to say that every creative person goes through this and that the solution lies in discipline and self-imposed deadlines and hard work."

This, I am learning, is true for any pursuit worth sticking with, creative or otherwise. And I think this is where the cliches, the "find your purpose,"  all of those tropes and bromides, where you need to do the work to make them mean something. "It's going to take awhile. It's normal to take a while," Glass says, "you've just got to fight your way through."

And with that, I'm happy to say once more for the people in the back welcome to Life Changing with Dori Fern, an imperfect podcast about a messy middle, as lived and told by me, sometimes featuring interviews with people influencing the way I see and navigate this trip. And sometimes just me and you.

I'm glad you're here and hope you'll subscribe and be back for more. I know I will be.