A new start after resigning from employment.

I resigned from my job and finished working my notice period at the end of July this year.

Why did I resign? Well, there wasn't one reason, is there ever for such decisions and endings? It is usually a collection of small issues that come together to make something ultimately intolerable. This happened over a nine month period, or as my husband would say, over the last couple of years. Perhaps he is right. Perhaps the collection of small issues creeps in almost imperceptibly until you can't ignore it anymore.

My role was as a service manager and services come and go along with the funding they are reliant upon. My senior manager had wanted to keep me when my last one went and gave me a selection of other roles and responsibilities which kept me employed. One by one they ended too, which is the way in this industry, and finally she asked me to take on three services based on the opposite side of the country. She said it was temporary until something came along closer to home and I agreed. However, nothing did come along in this part of the country; couple this challenge with one of a push to be in-person more and more, and it became untenable. She had said, if it became too much, to let her know. Well, it did, and I did, and that was not what she wanted to hear.

Now, don't get me wrong I understand her pressures, if I want a redeployment, that's only any good if there is anywhere to move me to, there wasn't so it would mean redundancy; it would involve losing my skills and qualifications, and it would lead to having to recruit someone new which can be risky. With those pressures, I understand she was going to find it difficult to be empathetic. Whilst she may have understood logically, there must have been more pressure on her than empathy for me allowed, and in the meantime as a 56-year-old woman, I was undergoing a transformation which meant that I was looking at my priorities, and travelling across the country more often did not feature high on that list. We all have our lists and our needs and they don't always align with people they used to align with.

So here we are: no redundancy and no clear plan.

I heard on the radio on Monday about a piece of research that had surveyed a large number of men and women in their mid-fifties, and many employers, about their experiences of finding work at this time of life, and it was not good news. Many men and women had applied for thousands of jobs with little human response throughout the process. This seemed a large number but I have no reason to assume the researcher was presenting incorrect data, so we have to accept this. When asked, the employers/recruiters she surveyed said that people in their 50s are too expensive and are unmanageable [by younger managers] and it is believed they are not as competent with digital networks, platforms and applications as younger people, overlooking that we were young adults in the 90s when these were emerging and were perfectly placed to embrace new technology. But what can you do, you can't change minds if they don't want to be changed.

I'm not actually looking for work, I have one community interest company (CIC) - Ostara East which I now have time to grow to reach her potential, and I have set up another CIC with a colleague who also moved on from the same organisation due to no commissions in the east of the country, so I'm pretty busy. But how to manage the uncertainty. Well, I need faith in laws of attraction, manifestation, fate, destiny, or just in myself, whatever I choose to put my faith in I have to believe it will work out because it is unlikely that I will get a job in the near future (aside from the fact I'm not looking!).

I feel that where I was working no longer served my highest good as a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and a daughter to people who need me, who actively need me, because throughout history that is the role of women my age. And I am okay with that.