One day this past June, I stopped by a Walgreens on my way home from work. Looking for a pair of Thank You cards, I weaved through the store, back to the aisle lined with Hallmark cards on either side. As I sifted through the cards, a catchy song started playing on the store’s overhead speakers. Curious what it was, I took out my phone and fired up Shazam.
After a few seconds, “‘Trouble’ by Lindsey Buckingham” appeared on the screen. When I left the store a short time later, I did so with not only a couple of Thank You cards, but a new favorite song… one that would, ultimately, become the defining song of 2020 for me.
Finding out the song’s title was “Trouble” was, I’ll admit, fairly ominous, given the circumstances of my life at that point in time. You see, the Thank You cards I’d picked up were for my bosses. Earlier that week, they’d announced that they were selling the newspaper I worked at. Not interested in sticking around to work for a different owner (and itching to start the next chapter of my career even before the announcement), I decided to leave the business – my professional home for eight years and first real job after college.
My decision to leave was cemented when I took a look at job listings online and spied several openings in my field, communications. As that hadn’t always been the case whenever I’d searched for jobs in the past, I took it as a sign that it was, indeed, the right time for me to move on.
So, two days after I picked up the Thank You cards, I handed them to my bosses, along with my key to the business.
While I felt good about my decision, there was still room for anxiety. Plenty of it. After all, I had left my job a month after becoming a father and taking on the responsibility of providing for a child. Also, there was, you know, the whole matter of being in the middle of a global pandemic that was causing economic turmoil.
Taking those things into account, in pessimistic moments, I felt like I was in trouble on multiple fronts. I mean, finding a new job would’ve been stressful enough on its own. But to have to do it in the same year that I was learning how to be a parent? While learning how to avoid contracting, and spreading, a new, virulent contagion? There were times I felt overwhelmed by the amount and magnitude of the changes in my life.
Something happened, though. Something I never expected. You see, when you’re dealing with more than one source of trouble, those sources don’t just interact with you; they interact with each other. And in doing so, alchemy can occur, resulting in one source of trouble becoming a solution to dealing with another.
Here’s how I experienced this phenomenon: My newfound status as a parent became added motivation for tracking down a new job. The last time I was unemployed, a decade earlier upon graduating from college, it took me over a year to find a job. But at that time, I was childless and single; I had no one to take care of but myself. This time around, I was a father, plus a husband. That drove me to work so much harder than I had before. And, ultimately, I landed a job in a quarter – a quarter! – of the time that it had taken me before.
Additionally, when I was between jobs and found myself lamenting the loss of structure that work provided, being a parent helped give me purpose. When I was unemployed before, I had nothing to wake up for in the morning; it’s why, depressingly, I regularly slept in until noon. This time around, though, I had the routine of waking up with my son to look forward to. We’d get up at 7 a.m., I’d change his diaper, get him dressed for the day, then take him to his play gym (an invaluable outlet for his deep well of morning energy.) After that, my wife and I would either team up on taking care of him for the rest of the day, or I’d handle those responsibilities myself, if my wife was at work. Either way, my son relied on me. Simply put, he assigned worth to me at a time when I needed to feel like I had some.
Don’t get me wrong, being the parent of a baby was, and continues to be, a challenge, as it is for all parents. But there’s no question that that responsibility helped me handle being unemployed far better than I would have otherwise.
The most important lesson I learned from the third source of trouble in my life, the pandemic, is that no matter how tough something may be, repetition will eventually make it less tough. You see, earlier in the pandemic, the prospects of wearing a mask and social distancing seemed so exotic. I mean, those were responsibilities that befell characters in science fiction stories… not people in real life. Having to incorporate both of them into my daily routine was uncomfortable, despite the fact that their necessity was clear.
The strangeness of wearing a mask, seeing others do the same, and distancing from those folks did eventually wear off, though. It’s just life now. And that’s due, of course, to repetition. You get familiar with the unfamiliar.
I experienced this sensation with parenting and job hunting, too. Before my son was born, the knowledge that I’d soon be waking up to feed him at 3 a.m., changing blown-out diapers, and tasked with interpreting what his cries signified was enormously daunting. It was likewise daunting pursuing job opportunities, making sure I was putting my best foot forward in applications, meticulously preparing for interviews, and delivering excellent interview performances, given how much was at stake. However, the amount of anxiety that all of those tasks induced invariably diminished as time marched on. Waking up at 3 a.m. was a lot easier the 36th time I did it than it was the first, just as my fourth interview of the year went more smoothly than did my initial one.
Back in June, it’s understandable that my reaction to having to find a new job, enter parenthood, and cope with a pandemic simultaneously was one of dread. I now realize, though, that there’s more to trouble than just the dread it induces. The truth is, trouble rewards you for confronting it. In my case, I identified, pursued, and landed a new job that was ideal for me; became a more experienced, confident parent; and adapted to a world with COVID-19 in it. In the end, trouble didn’t tear me down… it built me up.
Even so, that doesn’t mean I’m not glad to see 2020 come to an end. I will always regard it as a period of time where my life was destabilized. Because of that, I’ve been grateful for the stabilization that’s occurred over the last quarter of the year; I’ve gotten adjusted to my new job and even further adjusted to being a parent and being safe during a pandemic. I’m fond of routine. And I look forward to settling into my new routines even more in 2021.
I’m thankful that I’ve gotten to this place. And as this year draws to a close, I’m thankful that I get to say this:
2020 was tough. But I was tougher.
EVE OF STEVE 