The Long Hold: First Pause

Words from within change.

The room was familiar and at the same time new. I didn’t at first realize what I’d entered. The hold. The long, long hold. It came on suddenly with wallpaper spinning and the dizzying sense I’d get sick. Maybe it felt like being cast off to sea in a small boat with big wind. After the initial shock of it all, I thought I’d glide across the gap.

Not so.

Thirty years of work behind me and the mocking buzz of a market that no longer needed me. A perennial outsider. I never before knew the term “aged out.” I was 52.

I came to float in the dawn of the algorithm. Though algorithms aren’t new, I’d never experienced them turned against me. I never thought that each resume, each word of a cover letter, needed to match precisely what was requested. Machines talking to machines processing a thousand resumes for a single opening. Nuance, context, and subjectivity exchanged for stark specifics. Advised to remove experiences to hide my age. My experience. My wisdom. “Keep the young photo, it will help.”

So I turned inward, seeking something beyond mechanized judgment. I found myself in a long corridor with days spacious and uncertain. A few weeks of diligent searching, a few weeks of utter denial, a few weeks of hopelessness. This went on for nine months. Auspicious.

The spring of 2024 arrived, and with it, a different kind of air. I reached for stones at dawn. My meditations lengthened. I stopped listening for the market and started listening to the subtle weight of white quartz in my pocket. Somewhere in that season, I knew in my body I wasn’t going back. Work, yes. Maybe even another large stage. But I had fundamentally changed, and the change accelerated for an entire year longer. And still it goes. Spoiler: if fully alive, change is always changing.

I leaned into the cosmos. To spirit. To manifestation. Through the affirmations to ascension. Through shamanistic journey to the Divine Feminine. Through desert sand and forest and stars farther away than my conscious being could recognize.

The work was no longer about doing. It was about holding. Breath. Patience. A nervous system that could meet the day without running from it. There were words that moved through me then: Accept. Trust. Allow. Receive.

Most important of them all, Gratitude.

Next up: Descent.