Stability and other unstable goals

Stability — what does it mean to you? A job with the least risk of getting fired, a family/partner who doesn’t show signs of leaving you, a fixed income every month that helps you pay your bills, a promotion at work every 2 years, and an increased income linked to it, a home, a car, an annual vacation with your loved ones, a rough idea about how you will spend the next 5–10 years of your life…one, a combination or all of the above?

I was unemployed for over a year prior to which I had jumped 4 mainstream corporate jobs in 6 years. Many successful corporate leaders predicted that I was heading toward collateral damage in my professional life. I always got bored with jobs easily. I was seeking fulfillment in every professional role that came my way, but the strings attached to corporate work, alias work politics, the huge amount of pretension that had to be sprinkled in every walk of work life, the idea of being innovative and available 365 days in a year to ensure a spot in your manager’s list of stars did not feed my soul. I did not know if I was capable of feeling passionate about work! The concept of sacrificing the essence of core life to own a corporate designation was not sold on me. I was working in the people management area but was weary of human interaction. My interest in the latest HR trends was marginal. I was, therefore, an average (some say below average and too sensitive), passive employee with no ambition to become the CEO of the reputed organization(s) I worked for, in the next 10–20 years. I was good at executing specific tasks assigned to me and creative at intervals. But I lacked rigor, proactive problem-solving tendencies, and many other characteristics mentioned on my resume. I was, in short, a personification of instability and incompetence in the corporate world — the colleague you would stay away from if you are an achiever. 

(Caution: If you are disinterested in the dramatic trajectory of my personal life that resulted in this blog, skip to the paragraph in red font)

All this, and I quit again. This time, I was over 30, single, and had the noble responsibility of raising a 4-year-old! I was the perfect victim all my kith and kin had been waiting for, to share pearls of wisdom on how to live, how to approach life, how to chase stability, grab it by the neck, and marry it. I had heard (and occasionally paid attention to) many of my well-wishers ask me to start looking for (yet another) 9 am to end-of-life job, earn enough money to buy all those designer clothes and expensive perfumes, and show the world that I had bounced back! Well, I was living through one of the most vulnerable phases of my life then, ending a marriage with a 1-year-old baby in the equation. My idea of ideal life was all of what I said about stability in the paragraph above. I wanted a small, happy family in a great neighborhood, and tell the world that I was living it up, working in offices with fancy glass windows, do things that well-settled people do. And then all of a sudden, I was demystified and out there, with no knowledge or visibility into managing life alone. I cursed myself and my baby and sulked for a couple of months. I had no home, very few friends, and a brand new job that demanded superwoman-like performance. I remember how, on a Sunday afternoon, I cried biting down on a pillow. I cried till the evening, till I had no tears left, no energy, and craved food, water, and company. I can now say with confidence that that’s the day I took my first step to stability; this time, the more stable one.

It was a roller coaster ride from there. I found a home for the 2 of us, a fairy godmother who agreed to feed, love, and take care of my daughter while I super-performed at work, bought a car, and learned to drive in a traffic-heavy city, re-learned life — one with plumbers, electricians, maids, grocery shopping, loneliness, booty calls, cooking, cleaning, toilet training, feeding, multi-tasking (read: partaking in work calls with a baby in my hand, a cell phone balanced between my ear, neck, and shoulder, and typing furiously into the laptop to help my organization keep its employees happy) and much more. It was nothing like anything I had experienced before. I don’t want to trivialize those days by labeling them good, bad, or ugly. They were more than that. I thank them every day. The days that helped me separate wheat from the chaff in all aspects of life. I discovered true friendships, filtered needs from wants, and learned quite a bit about the superficial hype surrounding social life lived at parties, pubs, and the disco, having a partner, getting your game together, and the importance of image in corporate life. Well, I had none of these. 😊 I was battling with various versions of myself to understand which one I wanted to be, who I was, and what should I do with my life. The castles I had built in the air about a perfect life had long been deflated.

After months of what looked like the image above, I sobered. I quit that superwoman job, moved back to my hometown, traveled with my best friend to the foot of the Himalayas (my first backpacking experience), learned to identify myself as separate from my daughter, fought and patched up a thousand times with my parents and listened to what people around me had to say. I learned that problems are integral to the DNA of life, one can NEVER hide from them. The intensity of a problem is left to the imagination of its receiver. I learned that traveling by public transport to work is OK, not being the highest earner of my batch from college is OK, that flab around my belly is OK, not wearing lipstick, not visiting pubs every weekend with friends and their friends, not being updated about latest fashion trends, not watching that movie in world’s most expensive cinema hall are all OK.

None of these defined or took away from the person that I was. In the many years of trying to fit in, seek stability in its popular sense, reach the destination as soon as possible and bask in the glory of life, I had not found myself. The intensity of frustration I experienced stemmed from the extent of compromises I had made to merge with the maddening crowd. I had lost myself to green eyeliners, pink lipsticks, sparkly earrings, and expensive spa visits. I had run away from my friends, roots, and everything that defined me.

After over 18 months of misty existence, I woke up to reality. Alas! What a beauty. I realized I was living in self-made hell for the last so many months. I woke up to nature, a loving family, a beautiful daughter, new places, people, and experiences. But my quest for stability had not left completely. I rekindled that dying relationship and rediscovered life.

Stability — what does it mean? As a 31-year-old jobless, homeless (I lived with my parents then😒) single mom, I felt more stable than ever. A year and more ago, when I had a stable job, home and money, I suffered from depression, migraines, insomnia, and severe mood swings. I was unstable as an individual and a mother. I was running from pillar to post trying to find the secret combination to stability. After I woke up from that mental and social hibernation, I turned my eyes to the little things I had taken for granted; my parents — who gave me a roof to sleep under, food to eat, and love to warm me, my daughter whose unconditional affection turned me into a phoenix rising more jubilantly from its ashes every time, the unpolluted, healthy and rich environment we lived in, the freedom to laugh, cry, fight, sulk, love, travel, try, fail, stay dirty and unkempt….The possibilities of my situation were infinite. All these were hidden away since I was blinded by the more popular definition of stability.

I realized that stability was more a state of mind than a reality. My definition of stability re-aligned with the individuality and quality of my life than the yardsticks of mere professional/materialistic stability. I started measuring stability on scales of happiness and peace of mind. From then on, no amount of comparisons with my peers from school, college, or previous workplaces had a negative impact on me. I had discovered my stability. It was very internal. It was a perfect blend of my ability to remain sane, compassionate, realistically optimistic, loving, unaffected by subjective opinions, readiness to embrace uncertainty and accept my past, flaws, and circumstances. I had wasted some good years of my life believing that stability meant a stable job, income, and career. Well, better late than never, I realized that a stable career is only a small fraction of the universe of stability; a rather insignificant one at it. A stable person is much more than that. A stable person can get whatever their heart wants. A stable person knows with clarity, their life’s priorities

Yes, I still had to find a job to feed the two of us and pay my bills; but I didn’t have the pressure to overdo and take it to my grave. I could find the right job this time, with a mix that would cater to my priorities. Stability, I discovered, is very subjective and individual-driven. There is no universal recipe or definition for it. The more I accepted the transience and beauty of life the more I moved toward stability. The canyon that divided that air-conditioned 3-bedroom apartment on the 30th floor in the heart of a happening city and my modest home in the middle of nowhere had disappeared. Because it was all in the head, heart, and mind, not in the mansions I dreamed to own, the money I earned, or the 5-star hotels I wished to check into.

Stability, I learned, is a meaningful, holistic evolution to being a person that is unaffected by the exterior.