When Option A Blows Up, Don't Discount the Hidden Gifts of Option B

Chances are during your life things have not gone as you planned. Your marriage ended, you lost a job, you’ve struggled with illness...It’s part of life. Almost none of us get to live our Option A forever.

I’ve been reading the new book, “Option B” by Facebook CEO, Sheryl Sandberg, and psychology professor, Adam Grant, and it’s gotten me thinking about all the times in my life I’ve experienced myself, and been witness to when things didn’t go as planned

I remember when my daughter graduated from college several years ago. She worked so hard to get into the school of her dreams - Wellesley, worked hard while she was there, and even had a job lined up by November of her senior year for after graduation. She had everything planned.

As an economics major from one of the best schools in the country, she had been snapped up by one of the country’s largest banking companies who moved her out to California soon after graduation. She didn’t love the job - a junior VP position in wealth management, but she planned to stick it out for the year long contract she’d signed. The only problem was this was 2008. A few months after taking the job the economy collapsed. By January they had scheduled layoffs as they shut down her entire division. At 22 her Option A had flown out the window.

She came home, regrouped, and decided to move to Korea for a year to teach English. As a Korean adoptee she was excited to have a chance to spend time in the country of her birth that she’s left at three-years-old when we adopted her.

Emma ended up spending two and a half years there, met the American man who has since become her husband, and they now own a Korean restaurant in Montana. Her Option B has turned out better than she ever could have imagined. Ends up she was an econ major who hated banking and needed a more creative career.

As I wrote previously, over the past year my life was turned upside down by health challenges. Four stays in the hospital and countless hours recouping on the couch gave me lots of time to be thinking about how to deal with this reality. I have had to face the fact that I’ve gone from someone who was always healthy, save the normal ills we all grapple with, to someone who was really sick. What would life with a now-chronic illness be like? I’ll be honest, I haven’t stepped gracefully into this new life, I’ve been sad, angry and scared. I’ve worried too much and been fearful. Reframing this challenge into an Option B has given me hope and helped me see, life isn’t over, it’s just...different. None of us goes into anything thinking, “Oh boy, I hope this doesn’t work out so I can live my Option B!” But chances are we will all be faced with many, many times where we will have to reframe, restart, and build our resilience muscles to start over.

I would never have wished for divorce, a family struggle with addiction, or ill health, but each of these challenges has indeed made me grow and strengthened me in ways I could never have imagined.

Living our Option A may look like the ultimate achievement to all of us, but Option B comes with a lot of benefits if we just allow ourselves to embrace it and give ourselves the chance to grieve the loss of what was, while stepping into what can now be.

If you’d like to just sample a bit of what Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant are talking about, check out one or both of these fantastic podcasts. This one, from On Being, or this interview they did with Katie Couric. I have a sneaking suspicion you will be glad you did.

Looking for the Good When Everything Looks Bad

When I was in my twenties I didn’t really get it when people talked about how tough life could be. Sure I had my challenges, but they had thankfully not been too terrible.

But, as we go along in life often the challenges get bigger and harder to understand, nevermind deal with.

A friend posted this link on social media about the one question that can help get you out of a funk, and it got me thinking.

Recently I wrote about what I’d learned from having been seriously ill, but this question, “How is This Good?” is totally something else.

I think about dealing with my oldest son’s addiction, and now ten years out I can think of many good things - I’m less judgemental, my son and I are closer than ever, I now have experience to help others, I have more gratitude… I could go on and on.

But...if you asked me what was good back then, I would have found nothing.

There is a famous Mark Twain quote that goes, “Humor is tragedy plus time,” the same is true of seeing the good in a challenging situation. You’re not going to find the good the day your car gets stolen or you lose your job. But give it some time. If you practice this way of thinking you will eventually find the good in almost everything.

I’ve got a few situations that I’m patiently waiting on, but I have faith that soon I will see the good. And maybe, just maybe I’ll even find the humor.

Ask a Grown Woman - Wait, Am I One?

A recent episode of “This American Life” got me thinking about when I felt like an adult. They were discussing the topic, and referenced the Rookie Magazine column, “Ask a Grown Man.” Which by the way is awesome.

I was listening to this as I was doing errands, and had one of those NPR parking lot moments where I ended up sitting in my car for a good ten minutes waiting to hear what happened.

As I strolled the aisles of my local Stop and Shop, I kept pondering, thinking, when did I feel like a grown woman? Was it when I first had sex? No. Went to college? Um, no, as evidenced by my frequent, teary calls to my mom wanting to come home. Was it when I moved in with my boyfriend? Got married? Had my first baby?

What I realized as I kept thinking, was all these things made me think I was an adult, but I wasn’t nearly as grown up as I thought. When I got married at the ripe old age of 20 I thought I knew everything. Don’t most 20-year-olds? You don’t have to look far beyond a fight with my then-husband where I threw my favorite frying pan across the floor (forever denting it) and then tearfully began packing a suitcase to go home to my mom to see I certainly was not a grown woman.

I truly don’t think I felt like a grown woman until my 40s. Does that make me pathetic? And looking at it as objectively as I can, which means not at all, it was the difficult times that made me an adult. It was the situations that no one could fix that grew me up.

When my marriage ended when I was 41 I was terrified and at the same time slightly exhilarated. The floor next to my bed, thanks to Oprah, looked like a self-help lending library. Pre-podcasts I listened to cassettes of writers like Carolyn Myss who helped grow me up and take a hard look at who the boss of my life was. I was becoming an actual adult.

Lest you think I was this irresponsible dolt raising three children prior to this growth spurt, I was not. I was responsible, loving and there for my kids. This growth was internal. From the outside I looked the same, but I was growing into someone who had a deeper sense of self, something that I don’t believe comes until you’ve been knocked around by life a bit.

A year before my mom died she and I were out having coffee one day. My cellphone kept ringing and I kept going outside to take the calls. They were from my oldest son, who at the time was a heroin addict, out in Colorado, wanting to come back to get help. He had no money, was strung out and asked me to help get him home. The calls were all about the details of me wiring him money, and making plans to get him home. As I drove my mom and I to a nearby supermarket that had a Western Union counter, she told me she could never have handled all I’d gone through with my son. I hadn’t ever thought about what I was doing then, or the year prior that was all about rehab, overdoses, and trying to get him well. I just did what I had to do.

I believe those are the moments that make you an adult. When it’s no longer about you. You don’t really even factor in. To me being an adult is being able to put yourself aside for the good of someone else. This doesn’t mean it never gets to be about you, that would make being an adult completely suck. No, it means it’s not always about you, and you’re okay with that.

There are days where being an adult kind of stinks and I wish someone else could take care of the things I don’t want to. To be taken care of. But it’s also pretty awesome too. Like being a grown woman enables me to speak up, to say no, and feel (mostly) good in my own skin. It means not needing everyone to like me (mostly) and feeling happy in my life.

I no longer have a mom to run home to when the going gets rough, and I sometimes miss that. But, I have a team, people whom I love and who love me who are there. Being a grown up doesn’t mean you have to go it alone, quite the contrary. Being a grown up isn’t always easy, but I must say, I have not dented a pan in a really long time, heck, I haven't even slammed a door.

So I’ll ask you, when did you feel like a grown up?

The Big Lessons from the Big Sick

For almost all of my life I have been blessed with great health. It was easy to take for granted when you have never known anything else.

This run came to an abrupt end this past spring when I began to have digestive problems that over time escalated into a situation that couldn't be denied. A colonoscopy later I was given a diagnosis of ulcerative colitis. A malady I had never even heard of.

A cousin of Crohn’s disease, UC (as we afflicted affectionately call it) causes recipients to have lovely symptoms like copious amounts of diarrhea, making living a normal life a bit...challenging.

Since that diagnosis I’ve been hospitalized four times - the latest in December, which was dramatically ushered in with an ambulance ride from Cape Cod Hospital to Boston Medical Center on Christmas Day. Needless to say it was not my best Christmas.

I won’t bore you with details of my illness. There’s nothing worse than listening someone prattle on about their malady. I’ll just say that post these hospitalizations it’s taken weeks for me to regain my strength and get back to my life of yoga, work, having a relationship not based on dealing with doctor’s appointments and helping me, and feeling happy and whole. It’s hard to feel happy when your body is rebelling.

Somewhere within all of this I did manage to begin to tap into the resilience that thankfully always eventually returns, and asked myself many times over these months - “What am I learning from this?”

Once I got past some expletive laced, angry thoughts on how I didn’t want this f***ing lesson, I began to see I was learning a lot. And they were lessons that you didn’t need to have an illness to appreciate. All of us face challenges and we all feel like we’ve had the stuffing knocked out of us from time to time. And it stinks. But at the risk of sounding like Pollyanna, these times do equate to growth if we let them and don’t fall into a pit of despair. Don’t get me wrong, a certain amount of despair is normal, I’d say even necessary, the trick is not to stay there because, well, that will just ruin your life, not to mention alienate everyone around you.

So what have I learned?  Let’s break it down into some very official looking bullet points.

• We are all much stronger than we think we are. I won’t say that awful, “that which doesn’t kill you…” trope because, I don’t want you to punch me, and frankly, it makes me furious. That said, we are all much more capable than we realize. I never thought I could handle the tests, the pokes, the assaults to my peace of mind, but I have. Albeit with some tears, and railing to God, Universe, whoever I thought needed to take the blame. After you’ve cried and railed, you will come out on the other side and see that you survived. You. You did it. Don’t ever forget what a hero you are.

• One of my my biggest lessons has been the hardest to get - learning to accept and ask for help. I find this is notoriously a hard one for women in particular. We’re used to taking care of everyone else, admitting we might need help is tough. But the thing is, we ALL need help sometimes, and allowing others to help us makes them feel good - as good as we do when we do for others.  I have stopped with the negative self-talk (that led to negative spouse talk) calling myself a “burden” and “useless.” Thankfully I have a spouse who won’t put up with me talking that way about myself, and made me see that needing help didn’t make me a failure.

• Acceptance. This was another big lesson. As someone who’s been lucky enough to enjoy mostly good health throughout my life being diagnosed with a chronic illness felt unacceptable. How could this happen to ME?! I ate well, I did yoga several times a week, I thought I was bulletproof. Alas, I was not. None of us are. It’s taken a lot of work, some tears and anger as well, to get to the point where I (mostly) accept that this is what I have today. Who knows what miracles of either science or nature lie in the future, but for today I have UC, and have to either accept it, or wallow. I chose acceptance.

• Self-care isn’t just a luxury, it’s a necessity. My yoga and meditation practices have taken on a new meaning to me. They are now important wellness tools that I have in my toolbox along with the right medication, a diet that works for me, and working at reducing stress. These things are now a priority, not something I do when I can find time.

• There are of course illnesses that one does not recover from. I realize I am lucky that as crappy as this has been I have been able to return to a healthy state (though I’ve had many setbacks.) We all have the capacity for resilience. It may take a while to kick in, but knowing your ability to recover to the best of your ability is there helps immensely. This last time I was sick I began to doubt it, and for the first time wondered if I’d ever feel well and happy again. But like a crocus pushing through the snow, it emerged, slowly at first, but once it started before I knew it I was back. It’s hard when you are down either physically and/or emotionally to remember that light at the end of the tunnel but it is there, just have some patience,

Life is hard. You might not have a chronic illness, but maybe you just lost your job, your relationship ended, or you are trying to figure it all out and nothing is working. All of these lessons are applicable.Really! Ask for help, know you can handle more than you think you can, accept your present circumstances knowing they won’t last forever, take good care of yourself and know that you are resilient and will rebound. You’re a survivor just like me. The journey may not always be pretty, but eventually you find your way back.