Act Three
I un-retired a year ago. What I couldn’t have guessed then is that I was about to enter one of the most fulfilling and meaningful phases of my working life.
After I got laid off in 2017, I was relieved. I loved my job. Then we were acquired by a media company funded by venture capital and things got progressively less fun. You know how the rest of that story goes: content gets watered down; making your numbers is all that matters. I held on for years. I had a family and I needed to work. And then, 16 years after I started, my job ended.
Freedom! Or so I thought. I finished pilates teacher training, wrote a little here and there. And then life intervened. Extended family members got sick and died. My in-laws’ house burned down in a California wildfire. Covid hit and my family got hit hard. Freedom turned into survival, and after I finally lifted my head up from all that, I began to realize I wasn’t happy. I realized that freedom without purpose didn’t really feel free. So now what?
There’s really no creative roadmap for third acts. How this next part of one’s life looks is dependent on many things including whether one needs to continue working for money, or has some freedom to make decisions that might satisfy one’s soul. I am lucky that I could do the latter. My goal was not reinvention, but rather re-imagining a path that gathered the creative threads of my career and my work—in my case, writing and communication—and weave that into something new, something uniquely mine.
I stumbled into a friend’s writing class in January of 2023. I’ve published essays, magazine articles and a memoir, but I hadn’t tapped into that part of my life for a while. My friend taught a kind of free-form writing practice where we took a line of poetry, used that as a jump off line, and then wrote, quickly and steadily, for a set amount of time.
What emerged was surprising, and beautiful. I fell instantly and totally in love! For the first time in years I heard my writing voice again. How I missed her! It was like a jolt of electricity to my creative soul. I took three classes from my friend that week and signed up to take her teacher training that spring.
That was a year and a half ago. What a joy this time has been! I now have taught dozens of students in my Women’s Writing Circles, I’ve witnessed women meet their authentic writing voice for the first time. I’ve seen deep emotional breakthroughs. There was a lot of laughter and joy around my table as we shared our stories— realizing we have more in common than we thought, that none of us is alone in our humanness. I’ve taught retreats. I just returned from the Bahamas where I delivered dharma talks on writing as a spiritual practice.
For anyone reading this who finds themselves at a similar juncture in life, who has the ability to choose this next phase based on fulfillment, I say, take a step back. Look at all the threads of your life that have mattered most—the threads that make you uniquely you. Somewhere in there fulfilling work lies. It can take a little courage and some imagination. But your soul threads are there. They are powerful and tapping into them can bring you the deepest kind of joy. And this kind of work is bigger than you. When you share your gifts with the world, you are contributing to the greater good. You are paying it forward. That’s the real gift.
In the very best possible way, I’m not sure exactly where I’m headed next, but this much I know: It is a great joy and honor to participate in the creation of your own life. That alone is enough.