Transitions and the Power of Mayonnaise

     It seems that as I am transitioning, many others are as well. As I watch from where I stand, some are seamlessly making a new way and some are crashing and burning through to the next stage. What makes a transition easier? I've had both hard and easy transitions in my life. I cried at my college graduation because I knew things would never be the same. I stood in that field as the chairs emptied and my friends walked away to take pictures with their families, and I knew we would never be just a hallway apart again, we would never again eat dinner together every day, and I knew we wouldn't stay in touch as often as we promised. I packed up my dorm room, said my final goodbyes, and spent the next two years fumbling my way through life without direction, drudging through a toxic relationship, and being forced to face past traumas I had never dealt with. That was a rough transition. I've also successfully transitioned from food service to the corporate world where I was promoted through 5 different positions in 6 years at the same company, each time gaining knowledge and skills and experience that I can take with me wherever I go. As an athlete, I transitioned from a distance runner to a competitive roller derby player, where I learned new things that my body and mind were capable of. And my favorite: I've transitioned from someone who believed only other people knew what was best for her, who thought only other people knew how to live life the right way, to someone who knows now that I have a power within myself and that it's okay to say I do know what's best for me and to realize that sometimes other people don't have all the answers.
     I'll never forget this man who used to come in every day to the coffee/sandwich shop where I worked for the first year after college. Every day he would come in asking if I'd figured out what I was going to do with my life yet. Eventually, I came to dread him coming in. Many of the regular customers would ask me what I was going to do next and the truth was that I had no idea but I didn't know how to say that at that time, so the conversations left me frustrated and feeling beaten down. This one guy in particular though really bothered me; he had this smug smile and sarcastic attitude. So one day I'm at the sandwich station refilling a mayonnaise bottle. I have this big industrial sized bag of mayo and I'm holding it over the small opening to plastic bottle  and up walks this man and he says "That is never going to work; you're going to spill it everywhere." And I smiled and I squeezed the mayonnaise out of a tiny hole I had cut in the corner of the giant bag and it flowed easily into the plastic bottle and I finally realized - that guy was full of crap. He had no idea what he was talking about and he didn't know what I knew about the tiny hole in the giant bag. It became so clear that I had given this guy and so many others more power over my life than I was giving myself and they didn't have one quarter of the information and perspective that I did. That day with the mayonnaise was the beginning of many shifts that would happen for me, allowing me to begin to trust and accept myself and my decisions.
     Now, I've intentionally put myself in a place where I am not sure what my life will specifically look like and again I am getting questions about why and what's next, but the difference is that now I do know how to say "I don't know, and I'm really excited about it." I see now that that man just wanted to connect and the only thing he knew about me was that I had just graduated from college, so that is all he had to ask about. So often, people just want to connect and they seek the most obvious piece of information to connect to because it is safe and it is easy and it makes perfect sense that we do that. If I am standing in a place of confidence then I don't need to be frustrated or overwhelmed with anyone else's questions or comments on my life. So, what makes a transition easier? For me it is finding a way to trust yourself, your decisions, and the reasons why you are making a change in your life. Become okay with where you are, when you are, and realize that you are in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time, being exactly who you were meant to be.

Lots of love. Ashe.