The Story I told myself about money

by | Feb 10, 2016 | Money

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The Story I Told Myself About Money

The stories that play in our heads usually get planted there by whatever’s happening in the world around us as we grow up. We absorb them from parents, friends, and the wider culture, and depending on how loud and constant they are, we tend to adopt them as fact.

Growing up, the story in our house was: be careful with money, save for the rainy day that’s definitely coming. Good luck doesn’t last, and you’d better be ready when it runs out. That story wasn’t unique to my family. Most of our parents had grown up under parents shaped by war and depression, and they’d had the same story drilled into them. They passed it down.

Everyone interprets an inherited story differently. Some people hear “good luck can’t last” and decide to spend freely, so there’s nothing left to lose when the bad day comes. I went the other way. Every purchase became an internal debate: do I need this, or should I save it for the day I can’t earn anything and end up destitute? The rainy day always won. So I mostly just stopped spending.

The only exception was spending money with someone else who was operating from a different story than mine. As a lifelong people-pleaser, I weighted other people’s arguments more heavily than my own; if someone told me it was fine to buy the thing, I’d buy it, then spend the rest of the day quietly justifying it to myself, wrapped in guilt.

Sometime in my thirties, I noticed how extreme this had gotten and dialled it back a bit. But the core belief that ruin was coming eventually never left. Then I got married, had kids, and my ability to save took a real hit. I worried about money constantly. It was exhausting.

Then I got divorced.

And there it was: proof. My story had finally been confirmed.

Starting over after divorce is hard enough. Starting over while genuinely believing the world has ended and you’ll never see financial stability again is a different level of hard. The day I’d spent my whole life bracing for had finally arrived. I was going to be financially unstable forever. That’s a difficult belief to build a life on. I tried to limit the damage by taking no risks at all, hoarding whatever savings I had left and making them last until I died.

Then I started noticing other people telling themselves different stories. One that fascinated me: if you run out of money, you go find a way to make more. Really? That was allowed?

Another was the gratitude story: friends who felt genuinely lucky to live where they lived and have the work they had, who seemed to move through life with more actual joy because of it.

Slowly, I noticed something else too. Doomsday hadn’t come. I hadn’t become destitute. I had only believed I would. That belief was never true; it had just been busy manufacturing my reality anyway.

So what did the story actually do for me? It helped me save, and I’m genuinely grateful I came out of my divorce with some financial stability because of it. But did I need the guilt and buyer’s remorse that came bundled in with the saving? Honestly, no. I could have saved just as well without any of that extra weight. Pay yourself first; that’s really all it takes. I did that automatically every month. The guilt over everything I spent afterward wasn’t doing anything useful. It was just the cost of believing a story I’d never actually tested.

Do you have a story about money running in the background of your own head? What is it actually doing to how you live?

No Hobbies

by | Jan 27, 2016 | Money

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No Hobbies

Do you have your own business? Are you thinking about starting one? I’d tell you to put some structures in place for work-life balance.

Or not.

I was conflicted about this for a long time. I loved my work so much that everything else basically fell away. Someone once asked me what my hobbies were. Hobbies? I genuinely didn’t know what to say. I was too embarrassed to admit that Netflix had become the closest thing I had. I felt bad about it for the rest of the day.

Once I couldn’t come up with an answer, I started beating myself up over it. How had I ended up here, when my old tagline used to be something like “the only thing Renée is truly passionate about is her leisure time”?

Part of it was practicing gratitude. Once I started looking at my life through everything I was grateful for, including the work itself, it felt completely different. I wanted to be doing it. I’d chosen all of it. No one was making me.

But there was something else going on too. When you work for yourself from home, there’s no clean line between the workday starting and ending. The moment you’re awake, you’re potentially working.

A friend put it well once: someone with a nine-to-five has clearly defined hours they’re not being paid for. A sole proprietor doesn’t have that boundary built in anywhere, which makes it easy to just default to working whenever nothing else is scheduled, especially when you actually love the work.

That’s exactly what happened to me. I did what needed doing (the kids, the laundry, the shopping), and every remaining hour went to work by default. If nothing else was on the calendar, I worked.

As much as I loved it, I could see where that was headed: burnout, too many hours at a screen, not enough of anything else.

What I eventually landed on was that leisure time has to be scheduled deliberately when you’re self-employed. Just having free time doesn’t actually work. It’s a vacuum, and work rushes straight into it.

So I booked a weekly exercise class and paid for it upfront, since accountants hate wasting money more than almost anything else. I gave myself an actual non-work schedule and held myself to it the same way I’d have held myself to a time card if someone else had been the one setting my hours.

The Part-Time Single Parent

by | Jan 19, 2016 | Parenting & Co-Parenting

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The Part-Time Single Parent

When my first son was in his first year, I remember being so relieved I wasn’t a single parent. I was in awe of anyone who was.

Years later, I’m a single parent to two spirited boys for half of my life. The other half, I’m supposedly footloose and fancy free, though really it’s just catching up on the work I didn’t get to while the kids were with me.

So I don’t really think of myself as a true single parent, except on the days I am. Fortunately, I don’t have much time to sit with that thought, though it creeps in sometimes: single parenting really sucks.

On those days, I wake up at my usual 5:30, my body simply won’t stay asleep, and I sneak to my work nook to get ahead while I can. If I’m quiet enough, my morning child won’t hear me. He has some kind of instant mommy sense and knows the second I’m up, then follows me down asking if he can watch TV. If I dodge him, I work. If I don’t, I’m entertaining him until his brother, the late sleeper, wakes up. I make breakfast, make lunch, get them out the door for school, come home, work, work, work, pick them up, make dinner, clean up the mounds of stuff they haul home, get them to bed, try to squeeze in a little more work, and pass out, only to do it all again the next day. That was a run-on sentence, and it mirrors pretty well what those days actually feel like.

Every so often my kids’ dad travels for work, and I have them for two weeks or more straight. Those stretches are when I really feel how hard single parenting is, and I’m always grateful knowing a break is coming once he’s back.

Having a co-parent isn’t automatically easier, though. We couldn’t live together for good reasons, and parenting together across two households is still genuinely hard. On the days we disagree the most, part of me wishes I were just the one in charge, no negotiating, no dealing with someone I find unreasonable in that moment.

Then I get the kids back, and I have to figure out how to work with him again anyway.

All of this has led me to a few fairly firm conclusions.

Single parents need a lot of support. A lot. I’ve spent the past few years actively building that for myself: breaks I can count on, even if they’re not frequent, other people in similar situations to talk to, and a real backup plan if I ever hit a wall, which for me is my co-parent. Society’s slowly getting better at recognizing how hard this is, and support exists if you look for it. I also built plenty of my own, partly because the people around me kept nudging me to.

The other thought that keeps circling in my head: we talk a lot about single moms, and not nearly as much about single dads. They’re out there too, and they need support just as much. I did a quick search once for single-dad support groups and found almost nothing nearby; the closest one I could find was clear across the country. I wonder if that’s part of why dads seem to move into new relationships faster than moms sometimes do, needing another parent-figure in the mix because the structural support just isn’t there for them the way it increasingly is for moms.

My last thought is simpler: relying on my co-parent only works if we can actually get along. I’m not going to ask for help from someone I’m not speaking to.

I went through real anger at him, especially right after we separated. I held back from going for blood during the divorce and chose the Collaborative Approach instead, both of us agreeing to stay out of court, because I understood that conflict between parents is what actually hurts kids the most. I picked the path with the least conflict and talked him into it too. Only now do I see how much that choice has benefited both of us as parents. We can talk. We’ve built real systems for getting along. If we’d gone for the jugular instead and dragged each other through court, one of my biggest support systems right now simply wouldn’t exist. And the kids would’ve paid for that, along with two burnt-out parents.

If you’re heading into life as a single parent, know that it’s hard. Build whatever systems you can to support and sustain yourself.

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Ex Flare-Ups

by | Jan 10, 2016 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

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Ex Flare-Ups

Some things in life flare up on you. No warning, no pattern you can predict; they’re just suddenly there.

That’s how I’ve come to think of dealing with my ex. Not constant, not even frequent, but when it happens, it happens fast and hits harder than you’d expect for something so infrequent.

I’ve noticed these flare-ups tend to cluster around the predictable stress points: birthdays, holidays, the usual suspects. And I have exactly as much control over the timing as you’d expect: none.

I know the honest counterargument here: I chose to marry him, and whether something he says or does actually counts as a “flare-up” is really just my own interpretation. It’s not an illness. It’s a reaction. That distinction matters, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

But the useful part of the comparison holds anyway: whether something is a genuine crisis or just my own reaction to it, having a strategy for managing the reaction still matters. So over time, I built one.

The flare-ups come on suddenly, out of nowhere, infrequent but sharp. I never see them coming. Instead, I built a response system for after they hit.

First, I write out my full, unfiltered, knee-jerk emotional reaction, everything, no editing, no restraint, in an email. I ensure the “to” field is empty before I even start typing, so there’s no chance of accidentally sending it to him. When I’m done, I send it to a dummy account of my own instead. I don’t fully understand why it works, but it does. Something about hitting send, even into the void, gets it out of my system.

Then I give myself time. I don’t run straight to my support network to vent about whatever the latest thing was, not for a few days at least.

I breathe. I try to meditate. I remind myself that things rarely turn out as badly as my imagination insists they will.

None of this makes the flare-up disappear. But it does take the edge off the worst symptoms, the sleeplessness, the short temper, all of it.

More importantly, it gets me to a place where I can actually deal with him productively. Before I had any of this in place, my instinct was either to fight or to avoid entirely. Fighting feeds the flare-up. Avoiding leaves you sitting in dread, waiting for the next one.

So this time, I emailed him and proposed we talk in person, with some ground rules set in advance to keep the conversation collaborative.

After a few conversations, things settled. We’re back in a good routine, and I’m still working on ways to keep these flare-ups further and further apart.

Marriage Is a Credit Card

by | Dec 21, 2015 | Money

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Marriage Is a Credit Card

I’ve been getting some strong reminders lately about the importance of planning. Very strong.

The core lesson keeps repeating itself: skip the upfront planning on something important, and things can go badly wrong. Do a little work ahead of time instead, and life tends to go a lot more smoothly.

One place I don’t think enough planning happens is marriage. Plenty of wedding planning, sure, but not nearly enough marriage planning.

Here’s my evidence: ask anyone who’s been through a divorce, and they’ll likely agree that getting married is a walk in the park compared to getting divorced. Divorce is hard enough that some people just stay in unhappy marriages rather than face it. No escape plan, so they simply don’t leave.

A good comparison is credit cards and credit card debt.

Credit cards are easy to get, and a lot of fun if you haven’t thought much about what happens once the statement shows up. You get the card, you go shopping, and the first couple of months feel great. Then reality lands: wait, I have to pay this back? Plus interest? And if I don’t, I’ll be paying it off for decades?

At that point, getting out of the hole takes real, sustained effort. Getting into it was effortless.

Marriage works the same way. It was easy to get married when I was practicing, roughly a hundred dollars for the license, a few hundred more for someone to say the actual words that make it official. And then you’re married.

I hope you did some planning together about what the marriage would actually look like, and even more planning around what happens if it goes wrong. Because getting out is nowhere near as simple as getting in. You can’t just tear up the license.

You need a separation agreement, and those are hard to get precisely when you need them most. Once you and your spouse have reached the point of divorcing, you’re usually not getting along especially well, which makes agreeing on anything harder. So you hire help: a lawyer, a mediator, a counsellor, a financial planner, an accountant. Those professionals charge considerably more than the marriage commissioner did- several hundred dollars an hour, in my experience- and reaching an agreement could take a long time.

Or you skip all that and let the courts decide, representing yourself and leaving your future in the hands of a judge who’s never met you. Most people don’t take that gamble and hire a lawyer instead. A court divorce generally costs thousands more than a mediated or collaborative one.

The way around all of it is planning. Build a marriage agreement with a qualified professional before the wedding, not after things fall apart.

Yes, it costs money, and no, planning for a hypothetical future divorce isn’t remotely romantic.

But look at it this way: reaching a marriage agreement takes far fewer billable hours, because at that point you and your soon-to-be spouse are still on the same page. You’re about to get married, after all.

Not on the same page? Struggling to reach that agreement?

Then I have to ask: why are you getting married?

Choosing Not to be a victim

by | Dec 10, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Choosing Not to Be a Victim

Last week’s post is missing. Where did it go?

It got wiped out by two weeks of negative internal chatter and a brain stuck firmly on the worst-case future. When I finally climbed out, this week’s post showed up on its own: your victimhood perspective is what’s keeping you stuck.

You know the victimhood perspective. Life is harder for you specifically; your circumstances are uniquely difficult; you can’t do it; none of it is fair- those thoughts.

They’re the thoughts that lead to bad choices, or no choices at all, just avoidance stacked on avoidance. Instead of tackling what needs doing with some hope attached, you end up dragged into it, kicking and screaming only once things have gotten bad enough to force your hand.

I can think of one thing people avoid constantly this way. Taxes, anyone?

Taxes aren’t actually my issue; I like doing those. What I avoid, when I’m caught in this particular thought pattern, sounds more like: I’m too busy. My life is harder than everyone else’s. There’s basically a conspiracy against me pulling this off. I can’t do it; I’m not capable.

That was me last week, feeling forced into something I didn’t want to do.

I started by trying to let it roll off me. My last post, before this gap, was actually about waiting to see what would unfold.

That approach failed. Turns out I have very little patience for uncertainty. It felt like a countdown running in the background of my life, and I had zero control over it.

So I broke my own rule and started talking to people about it, mostly because I felt sorry for myself and wanted some sympathy.

I got the sympathy. Did it help? No. It just fed the “my life is so unfair” file a little more.

Some people told me, gently or not, that I needed to be an adult about it. I heard them, and promptly filed that too under more proof that my life was unfair. Why do I always have to be the adult? Not fair. I’m always the adult.

So I sat with it for a couple more days and felt progressively worse. I hadn’t felt that low in a while.

Eventually I pulled out my usual tools and started tricking my brain back into a better place. I wrote a lot of angry, unsent emails to myself. I started several blog posts that were mostly blame dressed up as reflection. I began writing down three things I was grateful for every morning, and got my kids doing it too, no yelling that particular morning, coincidence or not. I journaled. I basically tried to channel Pollyanna, which is funny given that in my twenties, a friend once accused me of being too much like her, and it wasn’t meant as a compliment. That trait got buried for years running with a crowd of Eeyores.

Eventually I landed on a line I kept repeating to myself: I’m choosing not to be a victim. I can deal with whatever gets thrown at me. I always have. That’s just life, and everyone’s dealing with something. Some of it really is terrible, some of it really is unfair, and we all still have to deal with it anyway. I get to choose how.

Then I sat down and actually became the adult. I addressed what had been making me feel like a victim, in the way I actually know how to address things.

And that was it. I got my life back. I started moving in the direction I actually wanted again. I reached out to people I’d been avoiding, caught up on my work backlog, and felt like myself again.

So if you’re feeling stuck and unhappy, check your perspective first. Are you telling yourself life is unfair right now?

If the answer’s yes, that’s the actual work.

Waiting to See What’s Revealed

by | Nov 26, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Waiting to See What’s Revealed

I have a friend with two decks of cards, Life Cards and Angel Cards. Every so often she pulls them out of the cupboard, and we each draw one from each deck without looking. The whole thing takes about ten minutes, but it drags us back into the present and shakes loose whatever future-focused spiral we’ve usually wandered into. We’ve turned it into a semi-regular thing, mostly so we remember to actually pause once in a while.

This week I pulled Revelation and Patience. Every week the cards seem to land on something eerily relevant to whatever’s actually going on in my life, and this week was no exception. It’s also the same theme that keeps coming back for me, over and over: wait, slow down, let things resolve on their own. I suspect it keeps showing up because I haven’t actually learned it yet.

Revelation told me to wait for life to reveal itself. Patience just said, well, patience, presumably while I wait for the revealing part. Two completely separate decks landing on the same message in the same week. A little eerie.

I’m not patient. I hate waiting. I like controlling the outcome.

What about you? Are you someone who sorts life into neat piles and tries to bend it into the shape you want? Do you see a problem and immediately start plotting the fix? Do you set yourself mental deadlines for when it all has to be resolved?

That’s me. That’s exactly what I do. I’m also a bit of a stress case because of it.

I’ve noticed that sorting life into tidy boxes mostly just sets me up to feel frustrated when reality refuses to fit inside them. Life never quite matches whatever I’d pictured. I’ve worked myself into the ground over deadlines, stressing myself and my kids out in the process, only to have the deadline move, or the whole project shift so much that all that frantic work stopped mattering anyway.

Logically, I know all of this: life never goes the way you expect, no matter how much energy you throw at it. I also know I can handle whatever comes my way. Which means I could, in theory, relax, take my time, live according to my own values, gather information, stay curious, and let the actual outcome emerge from the interplay of circumstances and people rather than from my own forcing it. I know this. I don’t live as I know it.

I was reminded of exactly this looking into my oldest son’s room recently. Disaster zone, as usual, now with a fresh layer of Halloween candy wrappers he apparently likes to keep around as souvenirs. I started in immediately: these have to go, this room is a mess, you need to clean it up. He mumbled, “I will.”

He won’t. He won’t because I never actually let him get there. I start freaking out and yelling long before he’d ever reach his own limit, so he cleans up grudgingly, under pressure, and learns nothing about his own tolerance for mess.

So, inspired by the cards, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to be patient and let life reveal itself for once.

Don’t get me wrong, I still want to control the outcome. What I’m actually hoping for is something closer to what happened to some friends of mine. Early twenties, living together, one of them decidedly not tidy. For about two years, their place followed the same pattern: mess building until the tidier one snapped and cleaned it herself. Over and over.

Eventually, she just stopped. She’d hit her limit on the number of times she could blow up about it, so instead she waited to see what would happen. I love this story.

Their place got bad. Genuinely bad. The kind of bad where a visiting dog could find a full meal on the floor.

Then one day, the person who’d apparently had no tolerance limit at all stood in the middle of the room, threw his arms up, and just yelled. He’d finally noticed. He started cleaning, entirely on his own, no nagging required. From that point on, he never let it get that bad again.

I’m hoping I can hold out as long as she did, though it might take a while. Mostly, I’m just curious what gets revealed. Will it play out differently? Will it make as good a story?

I’m hoping training myself to wait on the small stuff builds a kind of muscle I can eventually use on the bigger things too.

That’s my challenge to myself for now. Want to try waiting to see what gets revealed too?

Independent Renée vs. Relationship Renée

by | Nov 18, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Independent Renée vs. Relationship Renée

Not sure how many of you watched Seinfeld when it originally aired, but I did, and one episode has been resonating with me lately. George spent that episode torn between two versions of himself: Independent George and Relationship George, with Relationship George slowly killing off everything fun about Independent George.

I have the exact same problem. Relationship Renée (“RR”) is making life difficult for Independent Renée (“IR”), and IR doesn’t get off easy either; plenty of blame to go around on both sides.

IR seems to completely forget what RR’s life is actually like the moment the kids leave to spend time with their dad. To stave off loneliness, IR piles on work commitments, volunteer commitments, social commitments, anything to fill the empty hours. IR must be productive. IR must not wallow.

Then the kids come back, and IR becomes RR. Suddenly RR is making three meals a day, driving kids to activities, and trying to finish whatever unfinished work IR left behind during her supposedly productive free time. The kids interrupt everything. How is RR supposed to get anything done?

At this point, the kids aren’t really dealing with RR anymore. They’re dealing with GR. Grumpy Renée.

GR longs for the peaceful solitude IR had access to. Lonely, IR thought? GR will show her “lonely.” GR would kill for a moment of it right now, in the thick of everything. So GR looks ahead at IR’s calendar and slashes it to nothing. That ignorant IR, GR thinks. I’ll teach her to overschedule and overcommit. She’s doing absolutely nothing this weekend. She’s going to rest, recharge, and get ready for the week ahead.

Then, faster than you’d believe, IR is back, staring down the empty weekend GR just built for her. IR recharges in about a day, and peaceful solitude curdles straight into loneliness again. IR piles things back on to fill the gap and starts drafting rules for RR. RR must go to yoga during the week. RR must get more work done after the kids are in bed. No more Netflix, RR!

Then RR is back, negotiating with rules IR left behind. IR clearly hasn’t been using her brain, RR thinks. She has no idea how exhausting it is to work all day, fight over bedtime, and then somehow also write blog posts and self-improve between nine and eleven at night. I can’t do this, RR thinks. RR spirals a bit and starts wondering what the point of any of it is. There has to be a better way.

As with everything, it comes down to communication. Like the movie Memento, RR and IR have started leaving each other notes on their shared desk.

From RR to IR:

Before taking anything on, ask yourself if it actually fits your values.

What are you really taking this on for?

Would you still do this if you were genuinely short on time, or are you just doing it to stay busy?

(Yes, they’re all some variation on the same theme.)

From IR to RR:

I’m giving up some of my weekend fun time to catch up on the grunt work. Please try to actually let go when you’re with the kids and be present with them.

I’m recharging right now so you don’t turn back into GR. Remember your time with them is short, and the most important thing is being present and taking care of yourself.

Remember to find time to get your work done while you’re RR. Schedule a reasonable amount for it, and don’t forget to schedule something fun for me to look forward to as well.

IR usually adds a bit more, since she has more time to reflect than RR does: I know it’s hard, RR, but remember you do eventually get some solitude. Think of the single parents out there without a co-parent at all. Try to stay grateful.

Slowly, the notes are starting to actually land.

The one message they keep leaving each other, over and over: it’s going to take time to get this right. Be kind to yourself in the meantime. I’ll forgive your mistakes. We learn best from them anyway.

Divorcing Better

by | Nov 5, 2015 | Divorce and Separation, Family Justice Advocacy

Divorcing Better

When I was freshly separated, I was under terrible stress and in extreme emotional pain. My days were consumed with anger and sadness, and I remember wondering if anything could be worse than going through a divorce.

According to the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, death of a spouse tops the list as the most stressful known event, followed closely by divorce. Reading further, you can build a stress score by adding up all the significant events that have happened to you within a year. If you’re going through or recently went through a divorce, here’s what adds up:

Divorce, 73. Separation, 65. Change in financial state, 38. Change to a different line of work, which often comes bundled with divorce, 36. Trouble with in-laws, 29. Change in living conditions, 25. Change in social activities, 18. Change in sleeping habits, 16.

And that’s before counting all the other stressors that tend to show up alongside divorce. By this point your total score is already around 300. That puts you at real risk of illness. I’d never actually added mine up before writing this, but that number speaks for itself.

Everyone told me I’d get through it eventually, and life would get better, and they were right. It did get better. But it took real time, two to three years of living with above-average stress. And being a mom, I passed some of that stress along to my kids. I know their dad, dealing with his own stress, did the same. Nobody wins in that situation.

So how could it be better?

I’ve been trying to figure that out. My first idea was that marriage should just be a lot harder to enter into, maybe banned outright. That’s obviously not happening, and I decided I didn’t want to be everyone’s dream-killer. These days when someone tells me they’re getting engaged, I just smile and say congratulations.

Instead, I decided to put my energy into helping people divorce better. If enough people start divorcing better, maybe the stress that comes bundled with divorce starts to drop across the board too.

So what does divorcing better actually look like?

Learn how to do conflict properly. Doing conflict badly is probably what got you to divorce in the first place, and continuing to do it badly is exactly what makes the divorce itself so brutal.

This isn’t a quick fix. We’ve spent our whole lives learning our own particular way of handling conflict, and deciding to change doesn’t undo that overnight. It takes real work and real practice.

You’ll likely need a support system built specifically to help you do conflict the right way. Don’t hire pitbull lawyers who thrive on court and war. Hire people who will support both you and your ex as you each figure out a more positive path forward, now that you’ve decided to part ways. Hire people who will help you build the tools you’ll actually need to thrive afterward.

Spend your divorce dollars and energy wisely. Don’t put them toward support that pulls you further from a better life. Put them toward whatever actually moves you closer to living with hope.

People Turn Up When you need them

People Turn Up When you need them

by | Oct 21, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

“People turn up in your life when you need them.”

Someone said this to me recently, essentially predicting her own appearance in mine. At the time, what I was actually thinking was: I do not need this person in my life at all. She’d blown in the door and immediately started “advising” me on how I was living wrong. Within two minutes of meeting her, she’d decided I was too analytical and needed to think with my heart instead of my head. Then she went further: being analytical, she informed me, was the actual reason I was unhappy.

I was a little thrown by this and immediately started analyzing it, which, yes, is exactly the thing she was accusing me of. I take in information, I sort it, I decide whether it supports or contradicts what I already believe. She’d read me correctly, and honestly, it was a little impressive how fast she’d figured that much out. So I agreed: yes, I’m analytical. But I’m also pretty happy that way, so her actual argument, that this was making me unhappy, didn’t hold. Thinking with my head has never been the problem, whatever she believed.

She didn’t love that response and spent the next hour explaining exactly why I was wrong and needed to adopt her belief system instead. She upped the pressure by informing me I looked older than my age, also apparently a symptom of my unhappiness.

You might be wondering why I sat there listening for that long. I’ll direct you to my earlier post on personal boundaries. In hindsight, the better move would have been to just stop defending myself and walk away much sooner, something I’ll probably be working on for the rest of my life, since the people-pleasing gene runs strong in me.

Eventually I did walk away, and went to read How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran. That book showed up exactly when I needed it. The timing was funny too: my attacker had just told me I needed to dye my hair, and here was Caitlin Moran questioning why women spend so much energy maintaining a youthful appearance while men spend that same energy trying to get ahead.

Eventually the woman got the hint and left me alone, and I sat with what had just happened. (I’m analytical. Of course I sat with it.)

What I landed on was the difference between coaching and advising. My own coach listens to what I actually say and helps me work out what matters to me and what’s actually driving me forward. That’s a completely different thing from someone who’s already decided how life works and is trying to install that belief system in you. Coaching worked for me. I don’t have to force myself into things; I already want to do the things I end up doing. Advising worked too, for a while, back when I actually followed what people told me to do. But eventually the gap between how I was living and what I actually valued left me stuck. Living someone else’s version of my life stopped moving me forward at all.

After all that thinking, I landed on the one thing she said that I actually agreed with: people do turn up in your life exactly when you need them. It just sometimes takes a bit of work, and a bit of analysis, to see why.