My Ex gave Someone Else a New Diamond Ring

I learned today my ex gave my replacement a new diamond ring. I'm sure it came in a pretty box with a nice big bow on it. No, I wasn't married before, and I'm not harboring long lost lovelorn feelings for a former boyfriend. Last year when I left my job, a job I had for thirteen years at a company I had worked at for twenty-one, it felt like a divorce. The two years leading up to me leaving felt like my world was slowly be ripped apart until I felt I had no other choice than to resign.  It started with a "restructure" that  wasn't formally labeled a demotion, but two new positions were created, one given to a man who had come into the company through a merger two years earlier with another nonprofit, and the other, another man, from corporate America, who was going to get this non-profit reorganized for success. The current executive team was dismantled, though two of the four of us, had resigned a few months back, which supposedly was the catalyst for the restructure.  

Cut to the chase, and my position that was cut in half, and filled by two people, is now part of that executive team again. I had called it a year ago when I prepared for my resignation that within a year, those positions would be back at the agency lead table. I learned this news from one of my former managers, who I still work with on an indirect basis in my new job. I admit when I heard it, I was disheartened, a little sad, but not angry. It felt like how I imagine a woman would feel sometime after a necessary divorce. Knowing that the decision to end the marriage was best for herself, but not being able to help feeling twinges of pain seeing the next woman get the ring on her finger, the perks of the marriage, and the partnership that she herself had invested so many years into. 

And yet, the very fact that I equated leaving a job to leaving a marriage says to me something was very wrong. While our jobs are a big part of our life, and in my case, fulfilled much of my personal passion, they should not take over a life. Jobs are a means to earn money, and money is a means to provide a livelihood for me and my family and sustain a quality of life. Once we see them as that life, it is time to move on.