It’s Friday, and that means it’s almost time for more rest.
I’ve never had anywhere close to the amount of rest I’m getting these days. Sleep and even unscheduled time have both not been huge priorities for me throughout my life. I’ve always needed less sleep than most folks do, and I’ve always felt perfectly capable of juggling many tasks and responsibilities at the same time. But as I’ve said in the past, this is a time when I’m always in need of more sleep, more down-time, more rest.
We actually headed to bed around 10pm last night, and I literally do not think I’ve done that in twenty years.
Even more than my increased usual/current need for rest, I think my body was probably deeply exhausted from the awful day I had yesterday, and needed to get to sleep earlier to make up for it.
It’s going to be a relatively busy day for me, but tonight I got to spend time with Donna and JoAnna, two friends who have been in our lives for literally decades, and that’s exciting. None of us can remember the last time we were all at the same place together (besides Kellie’s celebration of life) in perhaps fifteen years, so after Kellie died we started trying to plan a time for the three of us hang out and reminisce. It feels pretty historic!
At the time I started working at the now-defunct Ashtabula County Youth Detention Center, starting all the way back in late 1999, it was a real challenge for me to see where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. It was a rough time for Kellie and I. We had gotten married about a year and a half earlier, and I had left the retail world without much of a plan for what came next.
If you want a reminder of just how long ago this was, here’s what that facility currently looks like:
Yeah, it’s been torn down to the ground for years now. Honestly, good riddance.
After a couple more years of working there, I started to gain more and more of a desire to do something with my life to make an actual positive impact in the world (which was something that wasn’t happening there). It wasn’t a healthy place to work and certainly wasn’t a healthy place to be incarcerated. Meals for YDC were made and picked up from Children Services, because they had a full commercial kitchen and were cooking meals all day for the kids who lived in the Receiving Home anyway. I had the chance to get to know a couple folks who worked at CSB while picking up meals, and Kellie and I ultimately decided that I should give working there a shot, since maybe I could have actually done some good in kids’ lives that way, so I took the leap.
This was the first of many times Kellie and I put what would become one of our most important shared career rules into place: When making decisions about what job to take next, our quality of life concerns were always to be prioritized over the money we’d make from that new position. I took a pretty huge pay cut in exchange for the chance to get out of the correctional setting, and it was absolutely the best decision I could have made.
After I had worked at Children Services for a bit, the decision was made to shut down the Receiving Home, create a treatment protocol, and then re-open a few months later as a Residential Treatment Center. Previously, it had been a residential setting for foster kids who didn’t have foster placements lined up for them. Children had to be sent out of the county if they needed residential mental health care, so this was going to make a big difference for kids in our community with serious mental health needs.
Half of my fellow staff from the Receiving Home quit, and 50% new staff were brought on to create our new treatment center. Donna and JoAnna were in that group. That was a challenging place to work as well. At least the intent was to help the kids in our care, which wasn’t usually the case at YDC, so that was an improvement. Part of what made that job bearable for me were the people I worked with, including those two. We have some real stories about the good old days, I promise!
It’s now been around 24 years since then, and we’ve all gone on to get our Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees and independent licenses. We’ve all done clinical work for decades now, and have had parallel careers in many ways.
So why the heck have Kellie and I continued to maintain a relationship with Donna and also a relationship with JoAnna, but not gotten together as a group in so many years? That’s what I’m pondering today. I think that’s probably the case with a lot of relationships that we all have. It’s such a common thing to hear people say that everyone wants to prioritize their relationships, but that everyone gets so busy and that it’s just so hard to make that happen.
That’s one of the differences with me and my priorities now—I have to put in the time and effort and energy to maintain these relationships, because otherwise I’m going to be lonelier than I can bear. It’s not a choice as much as a necessity for me.
If there’s a lesson to be learned for anyone else here, it’s maybe this: please text or call or make plans with the people you love. Maybe it won’t work out, and maybe you’ve grown apart in the intervening years since that relationship was a priority to you both. But maybe it’ll be a deeply life-affirming and joy-giving exercise for you. You don’t know until you try. Donna and JoAnna and I had the BEST time tonight!
Have a wonderful weekend, everyone. Talk to you on Monday.
XOXO,
Matt