The rocky road of change

I used to believe that my willingness to start over is one of my greatest strengths.

I suppose I still believe that, though I will admit that my faith has wavered over the past six months.

I turned my life upside down a few years back first in moving to New York and then leaving the radio station where I’d worked for more than eight years.

This was just the latest example of what has been a recurring theme in my life: Every so often, I’d treat my life like an Etch-A-Sketch, turning it upside down and shaking vigorously to provide something like a blank slate.

The first time wasn’t exactly voluntary. In 1990 and my family moved from the small Oregon town where I was born to the Central Coast of California. I was 15 years old, entering my sophomore year of high school and to this day I can feel the burning recognition of just how much I stuck out. My jeans were too tight, my neon T-shirts too bright. I carried my books in a duffel bag while everyone else was wearing a backpack.

It was uncomfortable at first, but I eventually settled. I made good friends. Life-long friends. I’m going to be meeting seven of them in Colorado later this month for a four-night reunion.

I became willing to make these sort of switches. Sometimes it was geographic. After graduating college, I moved to Connecticut to work at ESPN.com. Sometimes it was recreational. In 1997, I switched from skiing to snowboarding. Other times it was occupational. Like when I left my reporting job at The Seattle Times to become a full-time radio host in 2013.

I was never sure how everything would shake out. I was taking a leap of faith, and experience had taught me that I would (somehow) land on my feet and feel richer for the experience.

Over the past couple of years, I will admit my faith has wavered at times as I’ve tried to forge a path into a publishing industry that is (charitably) wracked by change.

This, too, is part of any significant transition in life. “The murk” as Cassidy Krug describes it. The thick soup of uncertainty that I’ve to be an unavoidable part of leaving something you’re familiar with, perhaps even something you love, to try something new and different in the hopes that it will prove to be a meaningful pursuit.

Cassidy is many (extraordinary) things. She is an Olympic diver. A 10-time national champion. She is also the mother of a beautiful 2-year-old and (as of last month) she is a published author. Her book “Resurface” looks at navigating transitions from one chapter in our lives to the next, and she does this by exploring the emptiness she experienced after moving from a world-class diving career into the working world.

I met Cassidy in a writing class we both took back in the first half of 2020. She has an incredible knack for describing both the physical aspects of athletic movement and mental components of competition. If she wrote about tiddlywinks, I’d read it. I talked to her this week for “A Fresh Face In Hell,” the podcast of Northwest author Jonathan Evison. The episode was posted on Wednesday:

I’m going to get back to my discussion with Cassidy in just a bit, but I do feel compelled to do a little bit of catch-up.

The Mariners beat the Royals 3-2 on Wednesday night as Anthony Andres Munoz saved a game in which Seattle pulled ahead in the bottom of the seventh.

Seattle has played fairly well, going 6-4 on its 10-game road trip and winning two of its first three games in the four-game set against Kansas City.

However, the Mariners continue to lose ground in the AL West as Houston racks up wins at an absolutely blistering pace. The Astros were 19-7 in June, and they’ve won their first games in July. Seattle sits at seven games back.

In the bigger picture, the Mariners are exactly where they’ve been for about the fifth straight season: In the muddled middle of the American League. They’re too good to give up on a wild-card berth, but not good enough to make you confident they’ll make the postseason.

I thought this story by Patrick Leary at SeaTown Sports summed it up quite well:

• The middling Mariners eye July upgrades

  By Patrick Leary | SeaTown Sports

OK. Let’s get back to Cassidy.

I was tremendously excited to see her book enter the world because, well, she’s my friend and I know both how hard she has worked at it and what an accomplishment it is to simply get a book published.

From an entirely personal perspective, however, I’ve been incredibly grateful to have that book at this particular point in my life as I’m trying to find my way through a transition that has turned out to be — at the very least — slower than I expected.

In retrospect, this isn’t all that surprising. I’ve moved cities and I’ve left full-time employment as I seek a greater level of creative fulfillment than I experienced when I was a reporter and later as a radio host.

There are times—especially over the past six months—that I’ve felt I’ve failed at this particular transition. That either the change was too great, my ambition too unrealistic or perhaps my skills insufficient.

I’m not saying this in hopes of receiving encouragement or reassurance. I’m simply being honest about my emotions, and one of the things that I’ve realized while reading Cassidy’s book is that being honest about your feelings—whether it be enthusiasm or uncertainty—is a powerful stabilizing force. It allows you to see the world as it is: complicated, conflicted. It clarifies the challenges you’re facing.

What I am trying to do is hard. For more than 20 years, I created content that the company I worked for distributed to its audience. Now, I am choosing everything from subject to presentation to distribution, and I am responsible for finding people who are interested in what I have to say.

I am also doing this after moving away from the city where I had lived and worked for 25 years.

Will this work? Well, to a certain extent it is. You’re reading this. I have a regular column at Seattle Magazine, which has published my first-person essays. I write a bi-weekly column for The News Tribune. I am a weekly guest on Mitch Levy’s podcast, Unfiltered. I co-host a podcast on UW football as well.

My main goal after I left the radio station was to write a book, however, and that is still very much a work in progress. It is eminently understandable why this would cause me to question the wisdom of my decisions or even my writing ability let alone wondering if all the time and effort I have spent on that project is wasted.

But if I think back to all of those times I’ve started over before, there have been moments in which I felt this very same uncertainty.

I talked about transferring colleges during my freshman year at the University of Washington. On the first day I tried snowboarding, I fell down so hard and so frequently that I questioned why I was wasting what would have been a very fun day of skiing to become an absolute novice on the bunny slope. There was a moment my first year as a radio host that I introduced Aaron Goldsmith as Aaron Goldschmidt and went spinning into a 2-minute cyclone of intense self-doubt.

Hindsight makes it clear those episodes were the unavoidable growing pains of learning something new. The crises of confidence you must stare down. The murk you need to wade through, and as difficult and unsettling as it may feel in the moment, it’s also insignificant when compared to the experiences I had in school, on the slopes and over the air.

I’m incredibly fortunate to have this opportunity to redefine what I do. I’m grateful that you’ve come along for this ride. I also appreciate Cassidy’s willingness to share her journey through the murk, and perhaps even moreso her ability to provide companionship and support in the midst of this transition both by virtue of her friendship and her wonderful book, which I think is applicable to just about anyone and absolutely vital if your someone like me who’s feeling those flickers of doubt about what it is they’re doing with their life.