Divorce

I’ve never been married.  Come to think of it, I’ve never been a really bad, drag out, knock down break up.  Almost all of my experience with divorce has come from television or movies.  Both mediums do a pretty good job of running you through the basic process and what the participants feel but until recently divorce didn’t click for me.

Last week I quit my job.  I understand your confusion as to how divorce and jobs go together.  Up until this job, I would have been in the same boat.  A job has always been a job to me.  You go in, you do your thing, you clock out and move along with your life.  It was a means to an end and that end was earning enough to do what you truly enjoyed doing with your time.  Maybe being in a position of power, where every decision came through me or maybe because of the relationships, this felt different.  The workday didn’t end at 5pm, really it didn’t end at all.  It would be a mental 24 7 of constantly thinking, analyzing, worrying about what to do next, how to get better.  Long story short, it was a commitment.  A deep commitment that was emotional, physical and mental.  Much like a marriage. 

In any successful relationship (I guess, it’s been a long time), you need a strong commitment along with a willingness to compromise, a devotion of time, energy, understanding that you are in something that’s beyond yourself.  You morph into something that’s bigger than just you, a team of sorts.  A pouring of yourself into a container that’s bigger than what held you before.  It’s an extension of self that comes with growth and change and hopefully a larger worldview. 

Or at least that’s what I’ve come to hope that relationships or marriage is, or strives to become.  Like I said I’ve never been married.  I have more recently thrown myself entirely into a job.  Such that the job would overtake any and all other responsibilities, and cause me to actively not do things so I could and would be ready for work the next day.  Is that what adults do all the time?  In any case, I had completed reworked my priorities, schedules, and social life.  The one thing that I kept doing was performing every Wednesday, and looking back on it now even that feels like it was part of a cliché marriage; the one night a week where you get to skirt your responsibilities and go out with the guys.

All of these choices were made willingly, mainly because I like the idea of being a part, an essential part, of something bigger than you.  A team, a partnership.  Also, I like being good at things, finishing things, accomplishing things.  This was an opportunity for all of that to come together and have everyone benefit.  Given a long enough period of time, your identity gets muddled (much like this post) and the defining line of you vs. you as a couple or you as an individual vs. you in this partnership/collective, becomes blurred.  It becomes difficult to see where one ends and the other begins.  As long as everything is going well everyone is happy and things progress as normal further blending that line.

For me, things started to head south until I quit.  It became interesting to see the moment where the fracture of the collective ended and how I felt like I was in a dark room reaching out wildly trying to find the edge of that blurred line to regain a sense of individual self.  Seeing something that you had invested so much time and energy into, felt like a divorce.  The whole breaks down into parts, into individual pieces; pieces, which in all likelihood will never come back again to form that particular whole.  

After giving my two weeks notice, the divorce analogy came to me.  It came to me when I was going through my usual routine but things started to change.  Tasks and questions that I would normally handle would be given to other people.  It was like the parents had decided to get divorced but hadn’t told the kids yet, so each was acting slightly strange and slowly deviating from the routine.  The discomfort of being there reminded me of what it must be like for couples who split up but still live together.  The routines are similar, but not the same even though all the characters are.  That cohabitation makes the situation far worse because neither side gets to move along.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic about a job.  Maybe I’m not.  I’m not quite sure just yet, time will tell.  I do know that all of those scenes in movies and on television make a lot more sense to me now than they did two weeks ago.