Finding Me First

A story of how a quest to find what was next in my life, became easier once I found the authentic me.

The great Oprah Winfrey once said, “The secret to life is there is no secret to life. You need to be honest with yourself, and do the work. There is just you, this moment and a choice.” These wise words are words I now live by. But it took a forced journey into finding what’s next to really embrace them.

For a whole bunch of reasons we won’t explore in this particular blog post, I have been pretty consistently dabbling in providing women’s empowerment programming the last 3 years. And I am always surprised at the “repeat attendees” that show up time and again to the programs. It was the wise words of the program’s Co-Founder, Jes Averhart that finally resonated when she said to me..”Why does this surprise you? You know women are constantly going through some new shit in their life and they need to remember how to”. And she is right, we are, and we do.

Which also means we are always struggling through some process of trying to “find what’s next“. Sometimes the journey to find what’s next is self imposed and sometimes it’s forced, giving you no choice. These journeys may differ in their urgency and intention, but always equal in the end result.

The last 7 years of my story have been full of both; forced and self imposed. None more forced than the day I became a widow. I lost my husband at the age of 56 to a rare blood disease. We lived on 6 acres in the woods with a large house and several buildings that housed his dog training business. My children were grown, married and living across the US.  I made the decision to sell the property and buy a smaller version of my house in town, closer to my job. I wasn’t upset about selling the property. It was located 20 minutes from my work in a remote section of the County.  I was clearly unable to maintain the property and living alone in the woods that far out of town was not something that I felt good about. 

Once the house sold, I bought a similar but smaller house closer to my work in downtown. I downsized some but brought most of my existing furnishings,  put a fence up for my husbands dogs, and moved in. 

Within 3 months, I hated it. It took me a long time, and an awesome therapist, to really understand why. It wasn’t that the house was too small…or the neighborhood inappropriate….or that I missed my neighbors. In my forced movement to what was next for me as a widow, I allowed myself no time to discover who the next ME was before I made those choices. I misread the moment as urgent and as a result, I kept my life exactly as it had been before my husband died….and just moved it to another house, expecting it to be the same. But it wasn’t the same. It was never going to be the same. And I was never going to be the same. I was trying to live OUR life, instead of MY life. 

So with the help of friends and family, I spent some time figuring out what about me in my new reality was still the authentic me. What did I know to be true about me. I became intentional about becoming self aware of what parts of my life were non negotiable; and what parts of my life I could comfortably put away in my memory box.  This was not an easy exercise with my constant Irish Catholic guilt assessing everything I was choosing to let go of or change. But in the end, I got comfortable with what the new ME was. Here’s what I knew to be true. I loved my work and the community I lived in and worked for. I didn’t want to change that. I needed to live in a property that I could easily maintain and would make my commute easier. I had minimal need for extravagance and prioritized uniqueness and experience instead. With our without a husband, I was, and am a  social extrovert and needed a personal connection to where I lived and the people around me. 

Once I had ME figured out, I embraced the ‘just you” part of Oprah’s wise words. I knew who just you was. And that made it so much easier to recognize “that moment in time” part of those same words. At a work lunch one day, I heard about an apartment that was in a great urban re-use development two blocks from my work. It was just one of 12 apartments in an old converted warehouse building and would go fast. It was something I could maintain, supported my work and made the commute to work stupidly easy. It was small but open and original to its architecture. I could afford it and still spend time and money on experiences. It was authentically me. 

So then, in that moment, I made the choice. Just 7 months after I bought my new house, I put it back on the market and leased the apartment. The house eventually sold and I still live in the apartment today. Once I made the choice, I owned it. I have intentionally curated the community of people that live in the building to become a community of supportive friends in my new life. It supported my forced journey to find what’s next. Several years later it also served as the backdrop to my own self imposed journey to find another next. In my new business, it has hosted people from all over the world…musicians, futurists, corporations, media, investors, entrepreneurs, movie producers, and more. All have hung out on Casey’s Couch.  Understanding the authentic me was something that I always intuitively knew was important, but this journey taught me to not just understand it but to feed it, nurture it, grow it. It has been an important lesson on the journey to finding what’s next for me and has been helpful in my new career.

So many people routinely ask me, how? How did you find your next. And my answer is always the same. First I found me. The authentic me. Then everything else just made sense.