Alice, 48 yrs, Spain
I’ve moved around all my life for work, until 12 years ago when I moved to Spain. Until then, I’d always expected to move countries every few years – I love exploring new cultures, and I’m pretty adaptable, but Spain felt, and still feels, like ‘home’.
What’s the biggest life transition you have had?
One of my moves was to a small island in the Mediterranean to start a business with a lifelong friend. The move itself, and the challenge of starting a business in a new country with a partner (I’d always worked alone or been employed beforehand) were actually relatively smooth.
The difficult transition came a year and a half later, when I decided to break with not only the business, but also the friendship, because while we had been (or so I thought) great friends, we made terrible business partners. It got so bad at one point, I was calmly considering ending things, and when I finally left, I was in a deep depression (even if I didn’t realize it at the time).
How did you handle this transition?
Badly. Probably because it was multiple transitions in one. The loss of a friendship I considered the most important and solid in my life. The loss of the dream of the business we were building. The loss of who I was to some extent.
What were the emotions felt during this transition? What’s the biggest emotion you struggled with?
Because it’s been a while since this happened, I can look back on it with perspective as yet another learning step in my life, even if there is still pain there.
At the time however, I felt betrayed, hurt, and more than anything else, uncomprehending – how had my life reached this point? How had I allowed it?
What is something that you have now that if you could go back, you would tell yourself?
If I could go back, I would teach myself that the way others behave is rarely a reflection on you, but rather a reflection on them, and that it’s how you react that dictates how the interaction continues.
When you rehash this transition again, how can you use it for future life changes?
This transition taught me a lot about myself, and the need to set boundaries and limits that I’m comfortable with. I’ve been pretty good at making sure I set those boundaries since (with a few slip ups at the outset).
What was the best advice you had at the time from a friend, a loved one, or a mentor?
It’s not really advice, but a good friend of mine’s shock at how I came out from this transition really impacted me. Their refusal to accept this new, diminished me, was critical in helping me find who I was again
“This may have been the most impactful transition of my life, because it taught me once and for all, that I could not continue to sacrifice my mental health on the altar of other people’s problems.”
How did it make you grow? What were the learnings?
To make it through this transition, and find myself again – or at least, the next, hopefully improved version of myself – took a lot of time and introspection. First, I needed to simply feel normal again, which I managed by ‘faking it until I made it’, but I knew that I had to actually process what had happened, otherwise I would never get past it – it was too big to forget about.
A big part of getting to through this was actually accepting my share of blame for the situation – I was too permissive, too eager to please, too scared of fracturing this friendship, and due to this, I failed to enforce boundaries. There was nothing I could do about the way they had behaved, but, I could make sure to monitor my own reactions, my own responses to any similar situations in the future.