letting go of how life should be
beyond hopelessness to new possibilities
In April of 2024, I began a year-long reinvention project in which I am blogging my progress each day, then summarizing with a newsletter article each week occasionally. This is week thirty-four.
What do you do when who you’ve always been and how you’ve always acted no longer works anymore? That’s when it’s time for reinvention.
I’ve written about how I started my career as a data scientist by going back to school and getting a PhD in statistics. That was a reinvention of sorts, but in some ways, it was just more of the same. Succeeding by undertaking formal education is very familiar to me.1
In my personal life, though, I had to remake who I was and how I acted after my divorce. My old strategies no longer worked. In the now twelve years since, I completely revolutionized my thinking about what makes a good personal life. When I divorced, I was certain that the only way I could ever be happy again was by getting remarried, or at the very least, getting into a committed live-in partnership. But after trying out multiple new relationships, one of which was live-in, I gave up. I felt hopeless, but beyond hopelessness was a new kind of hope.
I gave up on what I thought I should do and what I thought my life should look like. I bought a house in a suburb of Denver, after living within the city limits since 2006 (and before that, from age 2 to age 18). I invited my mother to move in with me (her husband needed to move into assisted living), and my 21-year-old daughter has been living here too, as she finishes college.
This is not the situation I imagined for myself.
I thought I should be partnered. I had to let go of that, because life doesn’t turn out how it should, it turns out the way it does.
my “winning” strategy for my personal life
My strategy throughout my life had been to find a man who embodied what I wanted to embody: stability and conventional success (my ex-husband), mountain adventure and romantic passion (my first post-divorce boyfriend), extreme intellectual achievement and even greater conventional success (the man I lived with for a time—an ER doctor, Air Force colonel, and as much of a know-it-all as I am), and visual artistry combined with practical skills (the professional photographer who inspired me to take photography classes and who taught me to do all sorts of home fix-it tasks).
Finally, I realized that I could be the man I kept trying to hook up with, or at least embody those things I admired in each. I was displacing my dreams and potential onto men. I was burning up my passion in romance instead of actual creative output. I felt like I could only be complete if I was partnered with a man who had the qualities, skills, and personal power that I craved for myself.
I discovered I could go skiing with my daughter or with a friend or even alone, without having to have a man sitting beside me on the ski lift or skinning up a mountain trail ahead of me. I could take photographs that captured emotion, memory, and meaning. I could hang my Christmas lights myself. I could be a know-it-all all by myself.2
As for the conventional success part of it, that’s the hardest to let go of. If I were married to or living with a conventionally successful guy, somehow that was enough conventional success for me. I could go off and do weird things like become a blogger during the Web 2.0 era or ditch my software engineering career, and I would still have that veneer of social acceptability that I craved. Maybe if I were partnered, I could even put all my energy towards my art, because there’d be someone else there to not just show conventional success, but provide the financial security conventional success brings.
when winning strategies lead to losing
In her 1995 book The Last Word on Power, executive reinvention coach Tracy Goss suggests that the patterns and coping skills we use to succeed, our winning strategies, also constrain and limit us. They define what is possible and what is impossible, in the context set up by such strategies.
As you grow up and then make your way in a career, you develop certain beliefs and tactics that are aimed at bringing about the life you think you should have, and the world around you that you think should exist. Each person’s idea of what should be is unique to them (though heavily influenced by their upbringing and the world they live in). What’s not unique is that we are all pursuing lives defined by our vision of what should be.
These strategies that you develop in order to succeed keep you from being able to consider possibilities that don’t conform to your ideas of how your life should be and what sort of actions should be taken. Your winning strategies become a straitjacket instead of a scaffold, like you hoped they would be (and as they served you, for a time).
Goss provides a template for uncovering your own winning strategy.3 You fill out this sentence: “I am listening for _______ so as to act by _______ in order to _______.”
For example, in my professional life, I’ve identified that my winning strategy has often looked like this:
I am listening for "What's a way to make a radical improvement to this situation?"
So as to act by making big changes that bring about such improvement
In order to be valued, admired, seen as a visionary, and rewarded as a visionary might be
In my personal life, my winning strategy had been something like this:
I am listening for “What am I missing in my life”
So as to act by finding a man who embodies that missing piece
In order to feel that my life is complete and recognized by people around me as such, and that I have achieved what I wanted to achieve, even if only vicariously
How do you let go of your winning strategies? How do you let go of the idealized life you are trying to get to? Goss says you must go through “the eye of the needle of hopelessness”:
If it’s going to turn out the way it does, why not pursue anything and everything in the meantime? Thereby you lose the “fear of death”—or, more accurately, the fear of loss of authority, status, and approval. You can invest yourself in what’s really important, as if you didn’t care about the risks or the outcome—because you already know what the outcome is.4
That’s what I did with respect to my personal life. I gave up. I realized it was hopeless to keep trying to make relationships work when they weren’t working. I quit trying to get to the life I should have.
Now I’m pretty sure it’s time to give up the winning strategy I’ve used with my career in the past.
week thirty-four reinvention project posts
Sunday planning — Day 230: Week thirty-four planning
Monday money — Day 231: Reconsidering the Nifty Fifty
Tuesday book club — Day 232: The turning of the wheel
Wednesday advice — Day 233: I feel so up in the air
Thursday thinker — Day 234: How your past success limits your future
Friday flash — Day 235: Life turns out the way it does
Saturday practice — Day 236: Identifying your winning strategy
Anne Zelenka is a painter, a mother, a writer, and a data scientist. She lives in Highlands Ranch, Colorado with her mother, daughter, four cats, and a dog.
Makes me wonder if I am just following old patterns by taking photography classes instead of focusing all my efforts on turning pro with abstract art
Turns out it’s not fun for two know-it-alls to engage in conversation together.
Seems to me people have multiple winning strategies, for different areas of their lives and possibly at different times of their lives.
Spoiler: the outcome is… in the end, you will die! They’ll “throw dirt on your face” as Goss says, or you’ll be burned to ash, or maybe you’ll be turned into compost. You will be satisfied in some ways and unsatisfied in others. You will not have brought your ideal life into being.
This is so good. How did I not know of this until today????