This is the 4th of July weekend and I'm spending it at the beach with my friend. We are writing a book about her life and her career. She's an engineer and also has a business as a professional coach and she wants to use the book as part life lessons, part professional coaching instruction manual.
I love my friend. She and I have known each other since around 1992 when we worked as interns for the same company. I was the quiet, studious little engineer, the one who put her head down, obeyed orders, did what I was told and worked hard. She was the political juggernaut who behaved as if every assignment she was given was a fight for civil rights. I imagined it was exhausting to be her, but she had some good points. She was always questioning the establishment and policing our management to make sure she was getting the same treatment as the male engineer in our department who, let's be honest, was given more perks and seemed to do much less work.
She was the first person who pushed me to compete at work. Up until that point I had never seen work as a "competition". For the most part I still don't, but I know that just because I don't naturally function that way doesn't mean I can ignore the fact that most of the professional world does. She was right, if a little over zealous about her message. You have to stick up for yourself, look around, and make sure you compete and fight for what you deserve or no one will give it to you.
After I graduated and finished the internship we lost touch. When last we saw each other she, ever the ambitious one, was getting ready to take her GMAT exam and enter MBA school. I on the other hand was just interested in getting my feet wet, using my degree, and finding out just what an engineer was and how I would do it. I took a small, unglamorous job in a remote area of Alabama where there were no professionals and no one to date. I didn't hear from her for years and assumed she'd gotten her MBA and was continuing her fast track career to the top. A few years later I saw her picture in Ebony magazine and she was being featured as one of the most eligible single African American women in the country. "Good for her!" I thought, and I was proud of her because it seemed that she was well on her way to getting what she had always wanted and what seemed to me her birthright. She was beautiful and outgoing, popular with men, and hungry for career success. Meanwhile I was dating my college sweetheart long distance and content, though lonely, in my tiny little garage apartment in Alabama.
Cut to today. Her career has been derailed several times. She's been making bad decisions about men, especially men with whom she works. She's started her own business as a professional coach but is finding it hard to find clients. She's been married and divorced with a man who steals from her, has a gambling problem, and forfeited on their home mortgage. She is a single parent, struggling to maintain a lifestyle just beyond her reach and spoiling a daughter who doesn't know how fragile it all is. I am also divorced but with no children, no foreclosure, no gambling, no debt. My career has also been derailed a couple of times but the position I have now is a perfect fit.
So now here we are, on the beach, writing a book. I'm trying to listen without judging and without advising her or playing armchair therapist. It's always easier to see where other people have gotten stuck, much easier than it is to coach and unstick ourselves. What's shocking is the number of things our lives have had in common. It's as if God gave us the same material to work with and then sat back to watch what we'd do with it.
I wonder if she is getting the same value out of this experience. I doubt it, but I can always hope....
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