September Spring | 4. The power of a new place
Can relocating aid personal recovery?
One September day nearly twenty years ago, I locked up the ‘Former Marital Home’ (lawyer-speak) in Oxford for the last time and later unpacked my belongings in a London hall-of-residence for mature students.
I left as a 40-year-old woman with a fixed world viewpoint, an extremely chaste past, and feeling low in feminine confidence, trust in the future, and sense of worth.
I returned as…!
My ‘back-to-work’ scheme
Mid-life divorce had meant I needed to find a full-time job after several years of part-time and freelance work. Re-entering the jobs market in midlife I knew I would have to re-train in order to up my appeal to a prospective employer.
The choice as I saw it was either to go back into my early career in publishing, or to focus on more recent work in libraries and to qualify professionally as a librarian.
The most important career-question for me was:
What did I need from a job?
Intuitively I felt I needed to rebuild my feminine confidence and form connections with others. Ease the awful loneliness and yes, maybe even remarry someday.
When I worked in publishing it had meant having my head stuck in a pile of proofs all day, whereas library work was sociable and interactive.
So that was how I ended up opting to do a one-year Masters in Library and Information Science at City University, London.
(Did I have some mental image of my future self working in The Bodleian Library and an attractive North American professor on sabbatical falling in love with me? Well, maybe.)
The power of place
That year showed me the healing power of fresh surroundings and new activities. I had a purpose, a course which stretched me technically, a ready-made group of fellow-students to get to know, and a vibrant historic city around me to explore with the benefit of a student discount.
Rereading my diary of that time it strikes me how much I wrote about my work progress, the interesting people and their stories, and the novelty of London, rather than dwelling on the misery caused by lost Edens of the past.
Feeling freer
What had happened to me caused me to reject my old beliefs about love, sex, relationships, flings, hookups. For a while casual fun was a tantalising game to play. In effect I had my forties in my teenage years and my teenage years in my forties. While it put the wiggle back in my walk, it wasn't a way of life that could satisfy indefinitely.
'Love wasn't a fluke'
Rereading that diary I can see the gradual return of a realistic confidence in my future:
My return
So I returned to Oxford and a new flat one year later, more open-minded, feeling physically liberated, with a little more work confidence due to a new qualification and an entry-level job offer at a university library.
I was still single, newly divorced, a bit traumatised, and uncertain about how I would cope but my year spent in new surroundings untainted by past associations and having something to occupy my mind and energies had definitely caused an inner, beneficial change.
‘Fresh fields’
I discovered that starting afresh in a new location can be a powerful way of untying yourself from the associations of a lost past or present. It can turn a definitive page in your life and accelerate the whole healing process.
Whether or not you relocate physically doesn't matter over all because you are still on the way to a new destination:
Your own future: yours to grow into, yours to own.
🍃🍃🍃
