This entire year has been strange so nothing should be surprising any more.

I’d like to think that I am a goal oriented person. I usually start the day by figuring out what I want to accomplish. Some days I actually succeed. It’s like I don’t know what to do if I don’t have a to do list handy.

Years ago, when I seriously started thinking about moving away from Orlando, the goal was to buy a small condo on on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Something small with less maintenance. I even toyed with a “tiny house” when it was the new thing.

If everyone thinks Florida is “paradise” then why would anyone want to leave? Right?

Of course, Florida was not my first choice of places to move to way back when. In the 1990’s, the goal was to move to Charlotte. I can’t remember why I chose Charlotte or why I felt such an urge to move there. That was before “remote work” was a possibility and it was incredibly difficult to move out of state without having either enough savings to live on (nope!) or the ability to quickly pick up and move (nope! I had a house to sell).

So when the offer came in to move to Orlando as a job relocation and promotion, I decided to go for it. The real goal was to leave Pennsylvania anyway. The Orlando move was good for me in a lot of ways but it took years to admit how much I missed fall and change of seasons and temperatures less than 90 degrees.

Why does it take so long to accept that what you THINK you want may not be what you REALLY want?

Anyway (there will be point here, I promise….) turns out staying in Florida was not what I really wanted. Multiple hurricanes convinced me of that. I also think my tolerance for heat went way down after menopause and cancer treatment. And here I am in North Carolina – where I WANTED to be all those years ago. Funny how that works.

The move to Orlando involved a promotion to a management position. I was promoted to a supervisor position in the mid 1990’s and then demoted (long story, not really my fault). I worked my butt off to once again “prove myself” and submitted my name for another supervisor position which I was grudgingly given. I think the second promotion was partly to avenge the wrongful demotion and partially because no one else really wanted the new supervisor position.

Just shy of three years after the Orlando promotion, I was laid off without warning. It was devastating personally, professionally, and financially.

There were many rocky years after that as I tried to find SOMETHING else, ANYTHING else besides insurance claims to make a living. During those weird years (trust me, it was a really weird 3 years) I ended up at a company where I was, once again, promoted to a management position.

The problem was that I didn’t really like the job and I didn’t have enough knowledge about the business to be a manager. I was faking it which sometimes works. One of the people in my group accused me of sexual harassment or discrimination or something equally as ridiculous. When I was told about it, I burst out laughing because it was the stupidest thing I had ever heard. Instead of asking for my side or doing any sort of investigation, they fired me. I negotiated a voluntary resignation and happily left.

I’m not certain I have ever really shared all of this with people. It’s like a shameful part of my professional life. And it’s how I got back into being a “worker bee” instead of a “queen bee”. And I swore (silently) that I would not go back into management again.

The goal with this recent move, was to downsize and reduce debt so I could start to reduce hours (maybe) and put myself in a financial position of not having to work as hard to get by. You know, like a pre-retirement thing. It sort of worked.

As an aside here (promise I am coming to the point real soon!)…around the end of July I found out a lady in the online cancer support group passed away. She had struggled with a far more aggressive type of cancer cell for years and we pretty much knew she was coming to the end of treatment options. One day she said she was going to research hospice options and just a few days later she passed away. This weighed heavily on me all of August. There just has to be more than work, eat and sleep in life.

So with all this background, I was mentally unprepared for the discussion that happened with my manager just before Labor Day weekend. The company is set to expand by getting some new business and, you guessed it, they were looking to bring someone else on board in a supervisory position. She chose me and said she would not have offered it to anyone else in the company.

I thought about it that entire weekend and really struggled with it, mainly because of such a poor history of crappy things happening after promotions. I ended up telling her that I would like to explore it further and told her some of weird history I have with being a manager.

At that point, it was sort of a theoretical conversation since the new business was not expected for a few months. Fine by me.

Last Monday, the company owner called and made a formal offer. Financially, it made sense – a salaried position (no more time and expense craziness!) with paid days off and paid holiday (days off were unpaid before but I could take as many days off as I wanted – more or less). It was also a change which was desperately looking for.

So I accepted the offer and was told the change would take place by Friday which also threw me for a loop. Was not expecting that at all.

But all week, I felt this strange underlying anxiety that I will screw this up, too. I just can’t afford to let that happen. And I also realized that accepting more responsibility at work is not exactly what the goal was for “pre-retirement”.

If I try to articulate this to people they think I am either making things up or being weird or complaining. Not complaining at all but I am trying to figure out why I feel so ambivalent about something that should be so freaking awesome.

I’ve rambled enough for now. Thanks for listening.