Confession

Last night, I began to write out a blog where I confessed to spending a great deal of my life hidden behind a layer of uncertainty and fear; a perpetual feeling that the walls are closing in, the sky falling and the rug being pulled out from under my feet. For a variety of reasons, I didn’t finish the entry – one of them being, I simply didn’t want to come out in the open about how I feel on a day-to-day basis.

For a great deal of my career, I’ve been somebody that people look to for answers, the solver of problems and the source for good information. Lately, I’ve felt as if I’m running into a wall of myself.

For the last few years, I’ve been battling this growing, sinking feeling that seems to louden its whisper with every passing day; I’m getting older and no longer the energetic young man I used to be. It’s a hard thing to wake up and feel a bit more worn out then I did the day before, which is often propagated by a full day of playing with Atlas.

While I normally contend with my own fear of the ‘rug’ being pulled out from me with reminders that it’s often little more than a feeling. This week, I began to feel it slip as I dealt with circumstances in my work world that completely caught me off guard. Following one particularly grueling call, I found myself escaping to my living room so that I could paint the walls.

It was a strange form of therapy. However, it worked well enough for me to get my mind off of things; namely, the call that didn’t go the way I had hoped it would. Thinking that the worst was behind me, I returned to my computer to discover that there was another problem to solve with a client – one that didn’t get resolved until late this evening after a nearly 12-hour day spent behind my screen(s) as I troubleshot the issue with the client team.

In the middle of it all, Atlas and his Mom stopped by to visit me. She was aware that I was in the middle of ‘putting out a fire’ and knew the visit couldn’t last long. It broke my heart to watch him go when all he wanted to do was play more, as I counted down the minutes until I was due to be back on a conference call.

All I want to do is be his Dad. All I want to do is play with him, be there for him and show him that he matters to me. It’s a rare thing for circumstances to cut our time as short as it was today. However, as I watched them pull out of my driveway, I realized something deep inside of me: I don’t want to do this again.

This week, I let Atlas pick out a new pair of shoes from Amazon, because he wanted to ‘look like Dad’ and get his own pair of high-top shoes. His pick? Glittering gold high-tops.

Those shoes arrived today, and I sent his Mom a picture of them. Atlas was so excited that he wanted to come over and see them right away. I barely had enough time with him to lace up the shoes before I needed to return to the urgent client work and join the panel of faces on a conference call.

I thought to myself: “I don’t ever want to do this again.” and I still feel that way as I write this.

Sometimes life closes one door so that it can open up a whole wall of windows for you. Perhaps that’s what’s happening in these recent situations. While the possibility of having a radical shift in my occupation/income stream doesn’t thrill me – what does is what’s on the other side of a change in the wind that I see coming.

I do hope and believe that amazing things are around the corner in my life – and that they’re already here.

It’s a bit of a confession to admit that my priorities have shifted more to my family than my occupation. However, I believe that’s a foundation that I can count on, and one that will keep me warm at night.

Let them eat cake.