When Worlds Collide...

I’ve said many times – and I think I learned this from my sister Sue, actually – that I like to keep all the areas of my life in separate zones.  I’ve always lived that way.  My friends come from entirely different groups and they rarely cross paths.  It’s been easy for me to float from one group to the next and I like it that way.

 

I’m finding that harder and harder to do lately and it’s kind of unsettling.  My worlds are beginning to collide!

Perhaps it used to be easy because I moved so much in my younger years.  When I leave an area, I tend to leave only footprints and take only memories.  That’s made it easy to keep on trucking down the highway.  I’m seeing that my current reality is much different.  I’ve been in metro Atlanta since 1990 – nearly 30 years!  That’s a lot of human interaction and it’s getting much harder to keep everyone organized.

Part of this struggle is that Atlanta is the biggest small town I’ve ever experienced.  No matter where I go or what I do, I meet someone who knows someone I know.  Some of this is due to the fact that I’ve had more than a half dozen careers in my time here.  Each position opens the door to a whole different group of associates than the last.  Add in the clubs and organizations, and things really begin to intertwine.

My husband is well-known and regarded in his business (music) so sometimes just my last name is enough to kick down the walls I try to maintain.  If someone doesn’t already know me, they know my husband.  Now, in this time of instant connections through social media, there’s no safe place to retreat!

None of this is bad, really.  I preach the need for human connections all the time and I stand by that.  We’re meant to all work together and be together in this world.  I’m all for that.  I just haven’t been able to make peace with the fact that I have fewer places to hide these days.

I recently started a new position in a place that taps into ALL of my former experience.  That’s a great thing but I’ve had to draw lines in the sand about my accessibility.  For example, my personal phone and email will not be available for business.  That said, my personal social media world is filling up with people from my 9 to 5 world and that’s just an odd feeling.  It’s fine.  It’s just not the way I’ve always rolled.

Perhaps this just seems more obvious because all of my boxes are spilling out and it feels messy.  Really, it’s just become more of a pot pourri than a mess but that doesn’t make looking at the box contents all jumbled together in the middle of my world easy.

I guess I just have to condition myself to accept that with age and time spent in one place, the collision is natural.  Worlds collide.  I’ll try to embrace it but I’m still going to retreat to my nook in the corner at the end of the day.