What the highs and lows of your life can teach you about your career
Other women have really beautiful photographs of themselves with their newborn babies.
I have banned all photos of me with my brand new daughter (now 15). Mainly because I look like I’d been dug up. After four days in labour, an emergency forceps delivery with a whole theatre of people shouting at me to push, I was so exhausted, and so over the whole thing that I just wanted to go to sleep.
As they wheeled me back on the ward with the baby in one of those see through cots, to give me the best tea and toast I’ve ever had in my life, a group of consultants and medical students came to look at me. They pulled back the curtain around the bed, took one look at my grey face (which I couldn’t lift up from the pillow as I was so drugged up) and gently closed the curtain again.
And yet, a few hours later, as a midwife pushed me in a wheelchair on to the maternity ward I could not stop the tears of happiness rolling down my face on to the downy head of my baby as I inhaled the smell of her. I can still remember that feeling. It is one of the high points of my life. And it taught me a lot about myself. Namely that I am determined and resilient. She was an IVF baby, and IVF takes a lot of determination and resilience, among other things. I also turned out to be physically stronger than I thought I was.
The highs in our life can teach us a lot, as can the lows. When you have a baby, they don’t really tell you about the lows. They don’t tell you that it is completely normal to feel useless, and a failure, and a fuck up on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, and to want to sometimes give them back to the hospital. They don’t tell you that the baby will grow into a teenager, who will test, and challenge, and push you in ways that you never imagined. They don’t tell you that you will be able to do absolutely nothing about your child’s emotional or social pain, and sometimes when the Calpol doesn’t work, their physical pain. A particular low for me was when my daughter was called something deeply unpleasant by a boy at her school. She didn’t want me to do anything about it, but it wounded her deeply. I still see him sometimes and would like to punch him in the face.
That particular low taught me that sometimes my empathy in overdrive can be unhelpful, and that an ability to notice your emotions, but not let them dictate your actions (thank you mindfulness training) reduces your chances of getting arrested.
Learning lessons from the highs in your life, and from the lows can give you lots of information about yourself, and is another exercise from the Firework career coaching programme that I keep wanging on about. Here are a few questions that you might want to explore to help you gain some clarity around your own career:
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