Forgive me for taking this into a very personal direction.
I can’t help it.
That’s the problem with feeling like your reason for being is always to have to explain things.
So, here it is.
I often make bad choices. Not bad choices because I pick things that I can’t do, but bad choices because they are things that take such an incredible toll on me.
I tilt at windmills: I choose battles that I know I have the tools to probably win, but also battles that I know will damage me deeply. I have paid the price. Year after year. Not gladly, always, but I am at least willing to pay.
It has always been that way: after years in the fire service, I sat at a public event and listened as another firefighter bluntly said to me, “Did you ever think you were the wrong person in the wrong job?”
Yes. Yes and yes and yes.
I’m just not equipped to shed the things I see and hear and feel. The colours, the smells, the sounds. They damage me — they sink right into me, and come back in nightmares and daytime fugues. They hurt, and I have spent years trying to have broad shoulders while other people seemed to shed things so much more easily than I could.
But I also know that I was very good at firefighting, at first aid, at crash rescue: that I could make some small difference, that, sometimes, when the rescue world was unfolding by the numbers and the rules, I could put myself in someone else’s shoes and provide a speck of unusual and necessary comfort.
That I could be inventive and creative, and if you think that sort of problem solving isn’t important when you have seconds to make decisions, you’re wrong.
But it wasn’t only firefighting.
An introvert, I’ve worked for decades in the ever-more extroverted world of modern media.
I’m coming off a job I probably wasn’t very suited for — an editor in chief of two newspapers where I was supposed to be the hard line boss, making decisions without ever looking people in the eyes as I made those decisions — and I’m heading into a new job now, one that I know all the parameters of.
The new job will be working in the world of op-ed — columns and editorials and letters to the editor — a kind of turf I know well, even though the geography of the new job will be both different and will also mean a sharp learning curve of new places, people and things.
I know how thorough and detailed I will have to be, how on the ball and quick and ready to go, and I am already sucking in my breath and whispering to myself, “you can do this.”
I’m pretty sure I can do it, and I’m more than grateful that a new newspaper is willing to bet on my skills and experience.
At that same time, I have worked hard for a long time.
And that takes me to tonight.
To a simple text exchange with my son Philip. I almost never talk about my children, because they have their own worlds to build without having to carry my baggage.
But this time, this time I will.
Because I opened up about my doubts and fears — something parents are loathe to do — and said to him that I was, among other things, looking forward to getting through the crazy world of moving and finding my place in a new work world, and hopefully getting back to a straight through-line of balance and quiet and calm.
I got a simple text back, 10 words in all. And they cut me to the quick.
In a good, good way.
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting some peace. You’ve earned it.”
Thank you. That’s all.
That small, sharp recognition from someone important to me.
Thank you.
It was like someone holding out a cold cup of water to a runner on a long race.
And I think I’m ready, I think I have the energy, to start making the best kind of hard unhealthy stupid choices all over again.
Allons-y.
Oh, I won't be stopping my writing here.
Thank you - Saskatchewan is a pretty amazing place.