Resilience was the unifying thread running through my life from my mid-20s through my early 30s.
When Mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005 and given a 5% chance of living for more than a year, resilience steeled her for the fight and brought our family together to support her.
When I quit my job coming back to Connecticut from Iowa to help Mom in her day-to-day fight, resilience got me a last-minute slot in the LSATs, and admitted to UCONN Law School less than a year later.
And when I graduated into a Great Recession that collapsed each of Connecticut’s economic pillars, resilience let me piece together a living through odd jobs and substitute teaching anchored by longer “contract” positions doing document review for big law firms or working for the Speaker of the House during the state legislative session.
Life had thrown me a few curveballs, but with luck and resilience, I was carving out a professional path for myself in Connecticut’s insular political and legal communities.
More importantly, I’d found the girl I wanted to marry. Jenny was a perfect complement to my life accepting my quirks and encouraging me to take risks like running for State Representative.
In fact, Jenny was so supportive that she even served as my Deputy Treasurer doing all of the complicated filing and paperwork for Connecticut’s Citizens Election Program.
If you ever want to test someone’s love for you, spring a last-minute filing deadline on them with Connecticut’s complicated State Elections Enforcement Commission.
By November of 2010, just after my 30th birthday, it felt like life was finally getting back on track. Jenny and I had been dating for over two years, were talking about engagement rings, and found the perfect condo to move into together in the neighboring town of Canton (even though they overwhelmingly rejected me as their choice for State Representative just weeks earlier).
On the drive over to sign the lease we’d been approved for (with the first-month, last-month, and security deposit check in hand), Jenny casually mentioned on a phone call with the founder of the company she worked for that she was on her way to sign a lease.
The founder told her to immediately pull over. “I can’t let you sign that lease,” she said, “without telling you that we’re selling the company at the end of the month and the purchasing company is going to try to recruit you to move to Austin, Texas.”
It was as if our relationship had just been sideswiped by a tractor-trailer truck.
The next few weeks were a blur of uncertainty. The Texas company did take over. They aggressively pursued Jenny who, as the creator of the product they acquired, was essential for managing the transition.
It wasn’t clear what this meant for our relationship. We knew that we both loved each other and wanted to stay together, but it wasn’t easy to see how it could work with her in Texas and me in Connecticut.
I had spent the past five years cultivating a very specific network and set of skills that couldn’t move with me to Texas.
In Connecticut, I was the three-time-elected youngest Democratic Town Committee Chairman in the state. I was on a first-name basis with every Constitutional officer including the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of the State. My Congressman had just campaigned door-to-door with me supporting my long-shot bid for State Representative.
Most importantly, as a newly-sworn in lawyer, I wouldn’t be able to get reciprocity in Texas without working as a lawyer in Connecticut for another four years. In Connecticut, I was a lawyer; in Texas, I was nobody. Even if I said, “screw it,” and moved with her, would she still love me as a nobody?
A number of gut-wrenching decisions faced us. Connecticut was not bouncing from the Great Recession and without full-time employment, I couldn’t promise Jenny that we’d make it work if she stayed.
Sure, I was working in the third-largest law firm in the state, but for a third-party vendor on a case that could end any day without the guarantee that another job would follow. And yes, I was on very good terms with the state’s highest office-holders, but there was a government-wide hiring freeze that wasn’t ending any time soon.
Plus, there was Mom. I’d originally moved home to care for her, but she was back to working full-time herself and no longer needed me. In fact, that January marked the five-year anniversary of her successful surgery, which is a crucial marker for being determined officially “cancer free.”
So we left.
All of it, behind.
Just weeks after dancing next to the Governor and his wife on the stage at his inaugural ball, Jenny and I packed up everything we owned (on her new company’s dime), shipped it across the country, then got on a plane and set out to make a new life together in Texas.
Austin’s a government town, maybe I’d find something involving legislative process or public policy down there, assuming Texans take kindly to Connecticut Democrats, which they probably do, right?
Or perhaps I’d sit for the Texas bar and get myself a seersucker suit, or try my hand at something new, or finally put my writing degree to work in some creatively fulfilling work.
The years leading up to our Texas move in February of 2011 had forced me to jump from Plan A to B, then C, and so far down the line, I wasn’t sure I even had a plan anymore.
But I know who I wanted to figure it out with. All Jenny and I had was each other as we stepped off that plane into the great unknown and the unshakable belief that resilience would see us through.
*September 24, 2020, started a 40-day countdown to my 40th birthday. Since I couldn’t travel to Ireland (½ of my ancestral homeland) as originally planned, I’ve committed to reflecting on a year of my life per day for each of the 40 days. Today I’m focused on ages 24 through 30. Daily-ish reflections may be found on my Facebook Page or on the new 40 Years of Wondering page of this website.*
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