Rebuilding Your Life After a Setback

My doctor looked at me and sighed. “There is no prescription for this. No shortcuts through the swamp. But you will make it out.” I respected this woman immensely. She was speaking to me after the major relationship breakup I was still reeling from in my mid-twenties. She had been through a divorce a few years earlier so her words were backed by experience, her empathy cloaked in the knowledge of someone who had made it through the swamp.

Sliding Doors Moments

Anyone who grew up in the ’90s may also remember the Gwenyth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors. Anyone? A brief recap: One day Helen is fired from her job and when she goes to catch her train two scenarios happen. The first she gets on the train and comes home to find her boyfriend in bed with another woman. She dumps him, finds a new man, a new career, and makes her life awesome. In the second, she misses the train and arrives home after the woman has left but becomes suspicious of her cad boyfriend and gradually her life becomes more miserable.

Yep, there is a generation of us who refer to these as “sliding doors moments.” The “what if?” can drive you crazy but sometimes when you look back you think, “Man, that was a shite time. But look at what happened because of it. And look at what could have happened if I’d continued to hang on to mediocrity because at least I knew what it was.”

Buck the Slide Into Resignation

The temptation to hang onto a mediocre existence is real. Despite the pull, you may feel toward something else, something more often – too often – gets dulled by the human condition for comfort and control. The problem is that when deep down, or not so deep down, you know there is a more for you and you don’t go after it you become miserable and it can get very difficult to find the motivation to pull yourself out of the rut. Stay too long in the rut and you lose that faint glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

One of my first jobs was working at a publishing company. I was a young and eager marketing coordinator full of life and possibility. However, I remember very clearly a middle-aged woman who was probably once quite pretty but now wore a hollow, blank expression and her pants a little too short. She never smiled, but she never got angry. She was just there, doing her job in accounts payable and left exactly at 5:00 every day. She had lost the glow to the mediocre and the resigned expression gave away the sadness that hid below. There are so many people like this. Resignation is the antithesis of light.

Let Rock Bottom Provide Direction

Fast-forward to the present. I did survive the ending of a relationship that I had thought was my forever. Not only did I survive, but I also thrived. I rebuilt my life by keeping my focus forward and not getting too far ahead of myself. One foot in front of the other and before I knew it the mess and muck that I had been stuck in was far, far behind me. Not only that, the path I had taken since then would not have happened if it had not been for that time. Had I not hit rock bottom, I may have just kept floating aimlessly in, what turned out to be, the wrong direction.

Still unconvinced? Well then take it from someone who has enjoyed undeniable success after encountering major setbacks: Rock bottom became the solid foundation in which I rebuilt my life. J.K. Rowling