It's Been a Year: Personal Edition

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

Friedrich Nietzsche 

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.
Arnold Schwarzenegger   

Any crash you can walk away from is a good crash!

Launchpad McQuack 

What do you think when you read those quotes? What is the theme?

Are they inspirational mini-memes to get you through a rough patch in life?

Are they meant to keep you marching forward despite doubts?

I see them as a byproduct of our ability as people to rationalize a situation and change our perspective. I've been doing that a lot over the past year. Actually I've been on a quest to do this more for over a year. There are situations you find yourself in that you simply cannot control, and that yearning for control over our lives, that illusion that you have control, causes pain and anxiety.

I've been thinking a lot about that and seeking insight to help form a better relationship with this force of non-control. Our culture usually calls for blaming the individual for their situation; if you hadn't chosen X, you wouldn't be in Y. If you could go back in time and change A, then you would be in situation B instead of C. This is beautifully elegant when you assume outside forces have little to no influence over your actions and that your situation will sometimes nudge you into choosing X instead of a different course of action at the time.

But this isn't about blame. This is about perspective. Understanding why someone would choose X. And when the situation you find yourself in sucks, you can acknowledge that there are bad things about the situation, and the only responsibility you have is to try to minimize the suckage because at the time X was the best choice to make, and perhaps the best risk to take.

Coming to New York was a huge risk for me. On the financial side, I wasn't sure I could make the bills, even with a doubled salary; moving here also doubled my bills, after all, so most of the financial benefit was wiped out by the fact that I was even coming here. I crunched numbers over the course of weeks trying to come up with a best guess of what I could budget. If it weren't for my parents, I wouldn't even have been able to make the move, as the initial cost of rent plus deposits plus fees were staggering for me.

But more than that it was a personal risk. I am isolated. My coworkers, as much as I enjoy them and like listening to them and could potentially learn from them, are coworkers, not family. I'm not even sure to what extent they are friends, really, as only a small percentage of them have even expressed an interest in what I did over the weekend or how my family is doing. It is perhaps safest to call most of them associates or colleagues and leave it at that. And the city reinforces isolation; there are so many people here bustling about that New Yorkers seem to have their own psychological shields to prevent getting too "close" to other people even as they pass within inches of each other on sidewalks and in the subways. 

To paraphrase Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "People people everywhere, yet none will stop to greet." It's almost paradoxical how lonely a person can be while at the same time being surrounded by people. 

My family couldn't come with me. There was a practical reason; my wife was one year out of having her benefits vest, and if she left she'd lose a huge percentage of what would go into retirement; that would only add to the statistics of what is already a dour outlook on American retirement funds. One more year, she's vested, and "safe" for at least some kind of meager return in her golden years. 

My son shares his father's Aspergian tendencies for routine, and is established at his current school. Displacing him would not be easy. Coworkers reminded me that kids are resilient, and they can make the transition if they have to; but this isn't a case where he must move, it would be a move we made in part to simplify our own lives, so his limited stable of friends must be sacrificed in the process if we forced a move. In the end he would adapt, and at best he'd reflect on the change as a crash that he could walk away from.

There was another aspect to the decision; support. I move away, I'm alone. Alone, but suffering for a dream job. They would be back home, missing Daddy but still having a home, the pets (three cantankerous but attached felines, one of whom has a death wish by eating adapter and thin power cables...what the hell?) and extended family consisting of Grandma, Grandpa, and several aunts and uncles. If they move here, we have no one. No Grandma to call when the school says the boy is sick and running out of the office isn't practical, no Grandpa to ask for the loan of a tool for a household repair. The boy especially loves staying with his grandparents as he's not yet at the age where everyone more than two years above his own age isn't "uncool" to be associated with.

We have a house; we bought the house (and are paying on the mortgage) as a way to be property-owning members of society. Foolish as it may seem, for our parents and grandparents having a home meant a kind of investment in the future. We weren't quite ready to give up our home, as it's on a nice property and may provide refuge from the city down the road if or when circumstances change. What happens if we were to move the whole family to the city? Sell it? Rent it out? Hire a management company to take over the property? Put our things in storage, or sell them?

In the end we decided on me taking this job and moving to the city while my wife and son stayed back in the homestead. This was...is...a strain on us. But it gives us options. My son keeps his routine, his familiar surroundings, and his friends. My wife has her friends and my extended family around to help and offer support. She has her investment in her job. And I have a wonderful job where I work with great people and am exposed to a totally different culture and way of life. 

With this comes a price.

It seems every day I ask myself if I made the right choice. My son has asked on more than one occasion why I don't have a job back home, why I can't just stay there? Why do you have to go back to the city?

Ouch.

And I am more than slightly aware of the judgement that I'm a bad father because I'm not there. Not entirely absent, but absent enough that my wife has been effectively reduced to a single mother raising the boy. I still apologize to her for the separation of distance and duties; she reminds me that she was the one who encouraged me to do this. We have options now. And when the boy is older, when he can better understand, the city offers something our home doesn't; opportunities. Opportunities in the city are more of an investment than buying a house, if you look at the ingredients of success and our economy these days.

I try to look at the positive facets. Those quirks that irritate each other in a relationship, the annoyances that at the time drive you batty but when you're apart you almost wish to selectively have those irritations back? We live them.

The communication between you? Most people now take it for granted. Conversations over the dinner table went away with meals over the dinner table. Most people now don't have them. We have meals that compete with scheduling differences and television and bad habits. Even when you're together, in many cases you aren't; people seem to have a bad habit of playing video games or dicking around on their cellphones rather than actually focusing for more than a few moments on other people in the room. While I'm in exile we schedule some time to talk using Skype; I try to make a point of asking how the day is going, or what the boy learned in school. We may actually be ahead of many families today in communication. I'll be the first to admit that we've not perfected it; on more than one occasion we end up texting via skype or iMessage and probably slip conversation between other tasks, but still, it's a point to communicate and it's kept us ahead of the taking-others-for-granted curve.

My wife has pointed out that I get to indulge in my Aspergian routines. When I return to my apartment, things are as I left them. If they aren't, then I suppose I have a burglary on my hands, but for the most part it's true. She thinks that I become irritated when they visit and the apartment is turned into a whirlwind of clothes on the floor and food droppings from the boy. Which isn't true. I'm mildly annoyed, perhaps, but not irritated. I have peace and quiet, not animal fur on my clothes and the scent of litter box wafting through the air.

Which of course leads to more guilt...when I am not doing something I can go to sleep. Meanwhile my wife is trying to convince the boy to go to bed, and wake him the next day to go to school. She may think I revel in not having this duty. In fact, I feel quite guilty that she has to put up with this. My scolding of his behavior and admonishments are remotely dealt via a network link, with only the promise of punishment when we're together again. I'm well aware it's not fair to her.

These are my struggles. This is the crash that I walk away from, the situation that has not killed me. I am fortunate in that my wife has not held these against me, at least not to any degree I'm aware of. I'm fortunate in that my son is generally well behaved at this point and not a hellion; he can be a handful sometimes but not to a degree that my wife hasn't been able to handle. I have been fortunate in that my new job has smart, wonderful people that alleviate some of the stresses of my disjointed personal life. 

One of those managers, before I accepted the job, had expressed concern over whether I could take the job if it meant being separated from my family. I understood that from a practical viewpoint it would mean they were gambling I wouldn't crack and end up quitting in a short time; that would mean a wasted investment in time and money on an employee who flaked on them. "In the end it's just a job," he said.

But it wasn't. The situation wasn't one of simply walking up to someone with a happy, stable job and offering them the chance to leave their family, leave everything that was familiar, and instead gamble their future on a startup. It was a situation where the job was a dead end. It had management that didn't even seem to pretend to care about their employees, and even the public was encouraged to dislike them. Stress, toxic environment,...this was a chance for more, and the struggles I now deal with are the price to pay for that investment. 

I deal with the self imposed reminders of being a bad father for not being there. A bad spouse for not being at home after work. A bad person for those times where I feel almost comfortable, having my own routines not being interrupted by the needs of my son wanting to show me a new video game or YouTube video.

I deal with these by reminding myself that we have options opening up. I have a home three and a half hours away in the country, where I no longer take it for granted when we get home from shopping and I look up and see stars. I am more aware of my family when we get to visit each other. I'm far more aware of what it means to have a work environment that is challenging but also doesn't feel like they're keeping score in an effort to put you on the chopping block for mistakes. I've also been lucky to be able to try concentrating not on blaming people for situations but being more careful to consider other perspectives, helping me grow as a person.

Someday the situation will change again. And this current situation will perhaps have made me a slightly better person in the process.