Last year, our book club read a book written by Terry McMillan, which felt like catching up with an old girlfriend because I haven’t read a Terry McMillan book in years! Yes, the author of Disappearing Acts, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and the classic Waiting to Exhale is still writing and still writing relatable characters. Now that I am in my forties, I understand the characters in her books so much better, and I appreciate the nuance and depth that McMillan brings to the narrative.

The protagonist of her novel, I Almost Forgot About You, Dr. Georgia Young, is bored with her career and her life, and she is ready for something new. After hearing about the loss of a former connection, Dr. Georgia is ready to shake things up in her life.

There is nothing like death to wake us up out of our stupor of mundane living and say to ourselves, ‘A Change will do me good!’The fictional Dr. Georgia Young and I have a lot in common, including living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As I am preparing for the last year of my early forties, I am ready for a complete life overhaul, and I have taken steps to move forward with my life. I am actively seeking opportunities to make a career switch. I have left the ministry and excessive church involvement behind, and after years of watching my world contract and become smaller, I am ready to expand my horizons again.

As I read this book, several lessons resonated with me as I am heading into this next era of my life:

Lesson One: It’s never too late to pivot.

Lesson Two: Avoid approaching the past with contempt.

Lesson Three: Begin the process and play the tape through to the end.

Lesson Four: Permit yourself to let go of self-imposed limitations and who you thought you were supposed to be.

Lesson One: It’s never too late to pivot.

Dr. Georgia Young is in her mid-fifties, an optometrist, twice divorced, and a grandmother. Many people would say she is too old to pivot because she is nearing retirement age. Dr. Georgia would be advised to stick with what she knows, which is optometry. However, Dr. Georgia has a passion for art and is skilled at it, so why shouldn’t she give it a try?

As I work through some of my issues, one of my biggest regrets is my career choice. If I could turn back the hands of time, I would have pursued a different career path. I have always been drawn to politics, writing, and problem-solving. I was also interested in the entertainment business as a behind-the-scenes creative, and I wish I had allowed myself to be curious and see where that led.  Of course, both of those fields are suffering right now, but who knows what would have happened if I had tried? I may have done it for a little while and then pivoted to something else. All I know is that my life would have been a lot different.

Right now, I am living a life I settled for in every way. Those closest to me know it, and I know it, but I don’t want to squander any more time. I am a decade younger than Dr. Georgia, and sometimes I think, “Well, this is what you chose and this is what you get. Too late to change now.”

But it is not. It is not too late to pivot.

I’ve been on a job hunt since the beginning of the year, and the second I walked into one of the places, I thought to myself, “This is where I belong.”  I have no idea in what capacity, but I’ve been in the process for seven months. I keep showing up and putting in the work. We are in uncertain times, but patience and persistence will pay off.

Lesson Two: Avoid approaching the past with contempt.

When we are in a rut or a funk, it is easy to look at our pasts with contempt. In the book, Dr. Georgia takes a different approach: She is intentionally making peace with her past and even those who have hurt her. Along the way, she learns that these people in her past have their own stories, and we’re all messed up in some capacity.

As we get older, a sad ritual of life is that we start going to a lot more funerals. After my mother passed away, I started attending more funerals of people we had gone to church with growing up. During the funerals, I realized we all shared a history, identity, and a past that only some of us were privy to.  At one time, I would have looked at our shared past more contemptuously because it certainly was not perfect. While I once may have taken that shared history for granted, as an adult, I have become grateful for those experiences because they have shaped me into the woman I am today.

For the last ten years, I have been on a downward trajectory in my life, with the last four to five years being an acceleration down into the pits. As I began to work through my grief of losing my mama, I realized how resentful and bitter I was about so much that had happened during this time. While I still feel like I squandered time that I won’t ever get back, I am also slowly making peace with it. I have asked myself what if I had to go through that to set myself up for the next stage of my life? Indeed, we often fail to understand our lives in the present; life only makes sense looking back.

Lesson Three: Begin the process and play the tape through to the end.

Dr. Georgia’s journey of making peace with her past takes her on a series of twists and turns until she encounters a significant plot twist that alters her story. She would never have had that plot twist unless she began the process and allowed the tape to play until the end.  Allowing the process to unfold completely is how we discover who we are in this stage of our lives and who is coming along with us.

Lord knows these last few years have been filled with some awful plot twists, and so I choose to believe I am due for a positive major plot twist. However, I am well aware that nothing will happen if I continue to do the same things I have been doing and don’t begin the process of change. I shared that I am in the process of a career transition; I am also getting support for some personal issues that have been festering for a long time, and I don’t want to be stuck anymore, so I am getting help to unpack all of this stuff in my head.

The best part of Dr. Georgia’s plot twist? It happened when she wasn’t even looking for it, and she had forgotten all about it!  Plot twists come when we least expect them, but they can’t happen if we never begin writing a new story.

Lesson Four: Permit yourself to let go of self-imposed limitations and who you thought you were supposed to be.

We all have self-imposed limitations due to the conditioning we receive from our family, culture, religion, and society. Sadly, we deprive ourselves of so much due to this conditioning.  Dr. Georgia may have missed her plot twist had she allowed these self-imposed limitations to continue holding her back.

I am working to let go of extreme religious conditioning about what my life is supposed to look like. Every time I try to conform to the ideas I have been conditioned to believe, such as the notion that there is one right way to do things, I end up feeling miserable and jumping ship, knowing I couldn’t make it work in the long term. I am not the type of person who fits into any boxes.  Due to my parents’ unfortunate marriage, I was looking for a formula to achieve success in the life I thought I was supposed to live with a marriage and family. Still, based on what I have seen in the church, I don’t think they have the right formula for success either.

Unfortunately, I have come to understand why there is so much adultery, sexual immorality, and straight-up mess in the church. Many in the church are straight-up living a lie: they are in loveless marriages, they don’t believe in all of the rules, and they don’t follow them, or they haven’t faced the truth about who they are. I listened to a podcast where one of the guests mentioned that when he was in full-time ministry, some individuals who fell into moral failures were relieved because they could then be disqualified from ministry and released to pursue something else, or they had a valid reason to leave their marriages.  They felt trapped otherwise, and being disqualified from ministry was their escape.

I don’t think that’s how it is supposed to work.

Throughout my life, I have observed people compromise and settle for marriage partners because they were “in the church.” Often, these marriages end up loveless due to incompatibility issues and lack of attraction, or they don’t work out because one (or both) of the spouses was false advertising and couldn’t keep up the ruse 24/7. I’ve reiterated many times that I would choose a man I am attracted to, who shares my ethics and values, and with whom I am compatible, over a guy who has none of those qualities but attends church regularly and volunteers.

I would rather be honest about who I am and the kind of life I want to live. I am probably still considered to be “churchy” by most regular standards, and I’ll own that. After the last season of my life, it has become crystal clear to me that I don’t want a life based on attending church, being held captive by too many man-made rules, and having to get in character and play pretend when I get inside the four walls of the church building. I want to live an authentic life and not play a character who “plays church”.

Those are some of the limitations I am letting go of so that I do not spend the second half of my life settling for the short stick and waiting to die.

Dr. Georgia abandons her self-imposed limitations and unlocks the key to a new life that she didn’t think was possible.

A Second Chance

“I Almost Forgot about You” is a second-chance romance novel, and my goal is to write a second-chance romance novel. One of the core themes of second-chance romance books is that both people blew it the first time around, which is why it didn’t work. Yes, I know it’s more tempting to blame one person for a relationship failure, but part of maturing is recognizing that if a relationship doesn’t work out, then both partners share a role in its failure.

In the book, Dr. Georgia gets a second chance and works through her insecurities and past wounds to move forward. Another central theme of second-chance romances is forgiveness. We not only need to forgive others if they’ve hurt us, but also forgive ourselves for our mistakes, and seek to understand how we have hurt the other person so they can forgive us. There will be no healthy relationship if we cannot admit our mistakes, wrongdoing, and ask for forgiveness. The way my personality is set up, I already know I will be doing that regularly. It’s that whole I get too intense and become a bull in a china shop thing. I am improving, though.

There are people with whom we have crossed paths in our lives that are unforgettable. Time has passed, we have moved about our lives, but we’ve never forgotten them. It may have been years, but we remember what we felt when we first saw them. We remember their eyes, their lips, their presence, and we reminisce over how they made us feel. What would happen if we saw them again and we were given a second chance?

Let’s take a lesson from Dr. Georgia and allow ourselves a second chance at life, love, and expanding our ideas of what is possible.

The ultimate lesson I took from this book is that it is never too late to write a new story.

“I Almost Forgot about You” is an excellent book for anyone looking to shake up their lives and allow themselves to write the next part of their story.