1. Begin Again
March 21, 2025 Begin Again
In late 2023, I posted on LinkedIn and on Facebook about the journey I was on, related to my career in some ways but more broadly focused on my life in general. Here is a link to that post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dr-kara-morgan_friends-and-colleagues-i-have-been-on-a-activity-7106254505444311040-3siX?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
That post helped me to process my thoughts and led to reconnections with former colleagues who were experiencing similar questions in their lives. I am on this journey to discern what is next. At that time of that post, I did not feel like I was where I was supposed to be. I felt restless, unanchored, adrift. I stopped working full time in March 2022. Work had absorbed a great deal of my attention for my entire adult life; without that, I didn’t know who I was. Financially, I did not need to take another full-time position, which I recognize is not a universal experience. Even though that was true, I pursued jobs for a while, because that is what one does. I applied to many positions that first year, but nothing came out of it. At this point, I was really starting to wonder, what do I dedicate my attention to when I am not spending time each weekday working on the priorities that come with a job and a career? And more generally, what is the life I choose?
In addition to my weekdays opening up, I had been a care-supporter/caregiver for my parents since 2012, and my parents were now both gone, with my mother passing soon before I left my last job, in January 2022. Finally, my kids had been a huge part of my daily life for 20 years, and now they were both away in college. I was struck by a lack of pull on my time, no long list of to-do items or needed planning or follow-ups. Who am I when the roles that have defined my adulthood have dissolved away?
On this journey, I have spent the last 18 months filling my life: building routines, strengthening existing connections, building new connections, reading, writing, finding, observing. Now, I am ready to share. I will post here each Friday to share my journey so far and see how well I can bring you along with me.
A new development is in the name of this website. As I have spoken with other women over the past year or so, I have heard over and over about this time in our lives being one of more questions than answers. The feeling of being unsure and unmoored was perhaps not only due to me being out of the workforce and an empty nester, but seems to be a phase that many women may go through, even when they are still in the workforce or were not a part of it, and even if they did not have children. It’s broader and deeper than that. There’s a lack of place. We are coming into our own power after spending a life of mostly following an external script. As I will discuss more later, we get direct and indirect messages that what is ahead for us is leisure and, eventually, isolation and illness. I do not buy this line, this story that society has granted us. So I am writing a new story for me, and, if you like, for us.
