I have chosen to be happy because it's good for my health

I recently started contracting for a digital marketing agency as a senior account and project manager. I have been doing account and project management most of my life, on and off, and love it. I love offering client service and I’ll admit that I’m pretty good at it– I know what mediocre service looks like and I try to offer the exact opposite. The agencies I’ve worked for were incredibly pleased with my service, which usually resulted in me managing their biggest accounts. This was fourteen years ago, when the advertising agency world looked and worked differently. Before social media, and e-mail marketing and website management and wiki pages.  

Fast forward fourteen years and it’s a brand new game. Project management is pretty much the same, but the technology focus that some of these projects require go beyond what 20 years of experience working on storyboards and radio copy, and 30 second TV spots offer. Yes, those are still happening, just not in a digital marketing agency – at least not the one I was contracting for. Additionally, something that happened as you fast forward is that I am a different person and professional, looking for a different and more meaningful life and what I do with it. I am much more mindful in how I invest my time (and on what).

I’m a hustler, and what I might lack in knowledge and experience I make up in drive and determination, and so as I committed to this role, I hustled. If I didn’t know how to push content live to a site, I’d ask, and create step by step and how-to-guides, and watch the developers do it, and learn. And because I don’t like quitting, I pushed through and did this for weeks. Seventeen weeks to be exact. And it nearly made me go through a nervous breakdown. You see, it’s interesting going through this experience in your 40’s, when you HAVE a ton of knowledge and experience, and you know exactly what you want and don’t want to do with your life. I’m sorry if I’m hurting anyone’s feeling, but I am not passionate about wiki pages or website management. I don’t speak that language and frankly, I’m not interested in learning it at this point. I probably knew two weeks into it that this wasn’t the right role for me. In many ways it seemed like it was, in a lot more ways it didn’t. But my determination kept leading, while my inner voice kept screaming “no, no, this isn’t it!”. I shushed it, and kept going, ignoring the signs around me, sent by a Higher Force. And when the inner voice needed help, it turned to my heart. Smart, because I always listen to my heart. For emotional reasons, but also for my health.

When you reach your fourth decade, and you have little people that call you mom, you take a lot more care of yourself and your health than when you’re in your twenties. At least I do. And so, I realized that even though the stress I was under was a really good diet, it wasn’t sustainable. I also realized that a huge part of my stress was the fact that I was doing something that I knew in my core, was not right for me. Call me sentimental, but I’ve reached a point in my life where I want to work in things that are meaningful, significant, that are touching people’s lives and making the planet a better place. You can do that working for an ad agency, and you can do that in your spare time while working at an ad agency – I just didn’t have spare time, didn’t even feel grounded enough to juggle both. I was really unbalanced and confused and exhausted. It took all of my energy (and then some) to make this work, simply because my entire body and soul knew it shouldn’t.

I rehearsed the conversation I’d have with my manager in my head several times before I actually had the guts to have it. Often times, it is so much easier to just stay, keep pushing through, avoid change and keep going. But often times, the right thing is not the easy thing. So I finally did the uneasy thing, and it was easier than I anticipated. Things that are meant to be, just need to be, and in the end, you just need to strive for what makes you happy. I have a daily messages calendar on my desk, and the message that day read: “Choose the harder right over the easier wrong”. Boom! Another sign. And so I did.

And as I sit here, three weeks after deciding to take control of my life back and getting back to my duties as mom, CEO of my household, and writer, I ponder on what the lesson for me was. Because there is always a lesson, and that is the silver lining of this and all experiences. I’m someone who does a pretty good job of listening to my instinct, following my passions, doing what makes me happy, and maybe the lesson here is that I need to do that all the time, nonstop, no exceptions. And as I grow and mature, more so, because we become less tolerant of not living our truth, not being happy. When we are younger, our truth is probably still being defined. Once it is, it just is and we live it. Why did it take me so long this time? I am not sure, but it was a wakeup call. Perhaps my lesson is for others too, because I have people around me in similar situations, and I feel responsible to share my experience with others. If there is a miniscule chance that this can help others I love, then it was worth it. This experience would have never killed me, but it could have damage my health – physical and emotional. I look back at what I was doing, how I was feeling, and how I was operating, and I feel a reaction in my stomach. And that is the feeling I felt most of my days. Ugh. Bravo Maru for stopping it! I don’t think of this as a failure, in fact I continue to work with this agency in a different capacity. I see this as a triumph because I took control. Yes, it took me seventeen weeks – it takes some people a lifetime. And that’s probably another silver lining here, the strength and resilience I realized I have was such a nice surprise.

Six days later, the daily message from my calendar read: “Appropriate words spoken at the appropriate time can be a force of nature”. Amen, sister. I’ve said my peace.