Last week I was cleaning out my computer and I came across my resumes. “WELP,” I thought. “I guess I can discard these.” It shook me in the moment to think that I will never need them again. My entire career took 10 seconds to delete.

After I did that I realized that I still hadn’t opened the boxes of the contents of my office that work had sent me in fall of 2019. I had spent 8+ hours a day surrounded by this stuff and it was boxed off and sent off without ceremony. Unlike retirement, there is no grand party, no congratulations, no watch to mark your years of service. You are just canceled. They send you your work life by mail, and that is that.

After they arrived, they sat upstairs for over a month, untouched, when Mr. Tucker had taken them downstairs and out of the way. They sat there for over a year. I couldn’t bear to deal with unboxing my work life and putting it up all on a shelf. I guess I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

This weekend though, I bit the bullet and I had Mr. Tucker bring up the boxes. I have a couple of pairs of Fluevog high heel shoes that I (obviously) can’t wear anymore so I made the decision to sell them & put the money towards some stuff the girls want for their birthdays. It made sense to just open them up and go through it.

In the end, it was less traumatizing to go through it than I realized. On one hand, I was missing my favourite San Francisco mug (SNIF) which I am not surprised was taken. I also had a giant soup bowl that had disappeared. On the other hand I got an iPod classic and some stress ball swag? The shoes were all there so that was what I really wanted. You win some, you lose some.

I needed time to process, I suppose. I think I needed to realize that maybe that was the end of one life but the beginning of another. Honestly, life is all about moving from one aspect to life to another. From elementary school to high school, from high school to university, from university to my first office job, from job to job…it’s always in flux and it’s always changing. For sure I needed to mourn my old life – I didn’t choose this change – but it doesn’t mean that every aspect of it needs to be negative. Having a motor neuron disease is absolutely awful but the flip side is that I am able to have less stress in my life. If I focus on the positive things, there are a lot of positives.

So good bye, old work life. I enjoyed our time together. I am now going to live a new life.