When Life Throws You a Curve
by Larry Jameson
Shortly after 8:00 a.m. on April 10, 2008, my wife, Beth, was standing at the office coffeepot discussing the recent layoffs with a co-worker when an employee from Human Resources stopped in and asked her to join her for a moment. Sure, you know what comes next. Beth became the latest victim of corporate restructuring.
I could hear the fear and disappointment in her voice when she called a few minutes later and simply said, "I’ve been laid off." Life had thrown a big, round-house curve. Unexpected? You bet. Beth was a few months away from her twenty-fifth anniversary in that department. Twenty-five years!
April 10, 2008 will be known in our house as the day of the big Pity Party, because we certainly had one. Woe is me. What do we do now? Et cetera. Then came an email from our youngest son at 2:47 that afternoon, just hours into our new life of misery and despair.
"I was just browsing Monster. Tell Mom I’m putting her in contact with a girl I know up in Fayetteville who works for a company that designs and creates resumes catered to that person and what they are seeking. She can have her resume looking good. I will give Mom her number. This is just the first step. Remember the ongoing message of your book. ‘Never Give Up!’ This is nothing but an opportunity." Then came April 11. Not only were we more inclined to pay attention to that email, our son came took us out for dinner and told us about a book he’d recently read entitled, Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. Now, we’ve both read it, and every person facing change in their life needs to know the story. Telling it will not lessen the value of the book because it’s the type of book you need to have with you at all times.
It’s a wonderful little story about accepting change. Four characters, two mice and two little people, were in a dark, scary maze searching for cheese. They found a huge supply of it.
The mice, not being as intelligent as the little people, watched each day for potential problems in the cheese room. The little people, thinking they were set for life, just went to the room each day, relaxed and ate cheese.
Then one day, the cheese was gone.
The two mice immediately ran back out into the maze looking for new cheese. The two little people were shocked that the cheese was no longer there. They worried, but they thought the cheese would come back to the room and everything would soon be back to normal. But the cheese didn’t come back. As the little people grew thin and weak from not eating, one of them began to have thoughts that the cheese might never return. The other decided to wait until it came back because it was his cheese and no one had the right to take it away.
The one having thoughts about the cheese never coming back decided one day that he needed to accept the situation and make a change in his life. He needed to go back out into that dark, scary maze and look for new cheese. His friend refused to go with him; he would wait until the OLD cheese came back.
With fear of the unknown pounding in his heart, the first little person stepped out into the maze. It was new; it was different, but he stepped forward into the darkness. More than once he felt even more fear gripping his heart and, more than once, he thought about returning to the safety of the old cheese room even though it had nothing to offer. Yet, he plundered ahead in the darkness of the unknown. Eventually he found a NEW cheese room filled with more cheeses than he could imagine. There were cheeses he’d never had before. And he saw the two mice, already there, enjoying the new life that had taken him so long to find.
Being laid off certainly wasn’t the first curve thrown to Beth. In 1990, she suffered an anoxic stroke that resulted in brain injury. Now, that was a curve ball! She awoke in the hospital not knowing who I was, not knowing that she was married and not knowing that she had two children. She’d lost her short term memory and peripheral vision. Cognitive problems associated with loss of memory and slower mental processing skills became evident as she tried to do things the way she’d always done them.
She was told that she’d probably never be able to return to work or, possibly, never be able to hold any job. As difficult as it was, we slowly accepted that Beth’s old life was gone. She would never be that person again. We stepped into the unknown, learning as much as we could about living with brain injury and, sadly, there was not a lot of good information. But we knew what problems she was experiencing, and we began to develop strategies to overcome them.
Beth was able to return to her old job, and she excelled in it. Many of her employee reviews were marked, "Exceeds Expectations." We discovered thousands of brain injury victims struggling with many of the same problems we had lived with for years. We watched the evening news and saw that thousands of soldiers were coming home from war with what was being called mild traumatic brain injury.
That prompted us to write the book that our youngest son reminded us about. "Remember the ongoing message of your book. Never Give Up."
Don’t you just love it when someone uses your own words to encourage you to do something? Wait a minute! Let us have a pity party. Let us feel sorry for ourselves. Let us wallow in the presumptive fact that our life has been destroyed. Let us hate the company. Please allow us to hate all of Corporate America. Never Give Up, huh?
Without a doubt our cheese got moved, again! It’s not very difficult to look around and know that cheese is being moved all over America. Maybe someone moved your cheese. Perhaps one of those giant, round-house curve balls was thrown in your direction.
Go ahead and have a pity day, but make sure it’s a day. Not a week. Not a month. Not a lifetime. This is not one of those happy ending stories where I tell you that Beth was offered double her previous salary at a new company, because we’re still searching for the new cheese. It’s out there, somewhere in the dark, cold maze. It’s out there. It’s pretty close to where your new cheese room is located.
What do you do when life throws you a curve? You find someone to teach you how to hit curve balls. You learn from that person. And, oh yeah, you Never Give Up!
Larry and Beth Jameson wrote Brain Injury Survivor’s Guide, published in December 2007. For more information about brain injury, visit http://www.braininjuryguide.org
