The Bittersweet Beginning of Endings

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman Philosopher (but also 90’s band Semisonic)

I absolutely detest the New Year’s holiday.

Maybe it’s because I am a pessimist at heart, or maybe it’s because my constant heightened state of anxiety doesn’t allow me to enjoy anything that other people do. Instead of looking at the upcoming year as one full of potential, I think mostly of the curveballs that await me. I always worry about the bad things that I can’t possibly see coming. My life feels like a game of dodgeball where I am the first player that the opposing side is aiming for. How’s that for negativity? It’s an exhausting existence.

Every year, I start decorating my planner in September or October for the following year. I thrive on a calendar, a schedule, a weekly agenda. I search for the most fun stickers, buy felt tip pens in the brightest colors, and spend weeks decorating the perfect planner so that it is waiting for me toward the end of the year when I start planning for January. The inside pages were finished a few weeks ago, and last night, I added a ridiculous number of Taylor Swift lyric stickers to the front and back covers. It looks fabulous. For whatever reason, I think that if I make it pretty enough, I can avoid whatever crazy things lurk in the future.

However, 2025 has already thrown me its first curveball.

In February, I started working for an apparel retailer that I have grown to love. I took over a store that was in absolute shambles from the prior year. Everything from the sales floor to the stockroom to the team itself was a disorganized mess, but I set out to make it better. If nothing else, I love a good challenge. Over the course of the following ten months, I built one of the best teams that I have ever worked with. We skyrocketed to the top performing store in the company by midyear. I constantly challenged myself to do better, go further, work harder. My goal was to be the best, get noticed, become the store that everyone else wanted to beat. And to a degree, that’s exactly what I did. It felt great to be in a place where I was performing at a high level. I definitely got a little cocky. I was already looking forward to going up against my own successes in 2025.

All of those things crashed and burned yesterday afternoon.

Early in the afternoon, a man approached me in the store and said that he had a really random question. I wrongly assumed that he was going to ask about clothing sizes, last-minute gift ideas for his wife, or where in the mall he could purchase some other weird item on his list. But no. This man told me that he was a contractor who had been told that my store location would be taken over by another retailer in the near future, and he wanted to make sure he was in the correct spot. After he left, I texted my boss about the interaction, and within an hour I knew. My store is closing a month from today. The mall cancelled our lease, and my company wasn’t even planning to tell me for another week, after the Christmas holiday was over.

I went through three of the seven stages of grief immediately after. I was shocked, angry, and absolutely devastated all at the same time. Being the best wasn’t even enough to save me here. No matter how hard I worked, how many relationships I cultivated, or how much I succeeded, I will still be starting over at the end of next month. I stood in my stockroom after a good cry in the bathroom and felt completely defeated. Everything was a reminder of what had been my normal only a few hours earlier. I had the unbelievable urge to start throwing things away. I tossed all of my to-do lists in the trash. Suddenly, I did not care about any of it. I left work a couple of hours early so that I could come home and be sad without anyone else to witness it. I deleted my work email and our district google chat from my phone. Being involved was the least of my concerns. That part, at least, felt really freeing.

So much of my own self worth is tied to my professional career. When it isn’t great, I feel like I am also not great. It is one of the things that I have tried for many years to overcome, and yet I continue to struggle with it on a daily basis. I gave myself last night to feel my feelings, and today I will take action. I will revise my resume and begin to send it out. I will begin to start over again.

Maybe 2025 will hold all of the best things for me. What better time to begin again than in January?