Last weekend, I had the chance to spend a retreat at the Conception Abbey, a Benedictine Abbey in Conception, Missouri. The theme was "Entering Summer: A weekend of reflection", and basically provided a lot of quiet time for me to read, pray and decompress. The retreat wasn't really what I was expecting (though in fairness, I didn't really know what I was expecting), but overall it was still a nice retreat.

As part of the weekend, there were three sessions led by the priests of the Abbey. One of these sessions really hit home with me in a way I didn't see coming. Fr. Daniel noted that summer is always seen as a time of change. The seasons and the weather literally change. School children change grades in summer, schedules change, life changes. It is a beginning of some things and an end of others. To paraphrase, he asked us if this was a summer of beginnings or endings, if we were closing a chapter or starting to begin a new one.

Unto itself, this could be a trite, meaningless query. But it really ran around in my head for a while. Can I close some unfinished business? Can I leave behind something that I've been dragging around?

I'm sure you've guessed that my answer was "yes".

When I was 19 years old, I got a part-time job waiting tables at a now-closed restaurant in Overland Park. I freaking LOVED it. I was good at my job, it was a fun job, those were fun days. I remember thinking that I wanted to do this for the rest of my life, and started putting all my effort into thinking that one day I'd own my own restaurant. Over the next five or six years, I'd change employers a lot, always staying in the bar/restaurant/hotel hospitality business. I'd get a few trainer jobs, then supervisor jobs, then management jobs and I've done everything you can do in a restaurant. I've washed dishes, crunched payroll, wrote menus, worked with world-traveled chefs, sold $300 bottles of wine to millionaires and $1 glasses of gin to cocaine dealers. I've marshaled bar fights, set up for Grammy-winning musicians and spent every hour of the day on the clock in a bar or restaurant at one time or another. I was pretty good at it, and despite my mercurial attitude and temperament, liked it all a lot.

In the restaurant business, you can get all the timeclock that you want. You can work 12 shifts in 7 days. Exciting work too! There's fire, knives, drunks, illegal immigrants, jerkwad managers, high school dropouts, whiskey, arrogance, fights and trysts for all hours of the day or night. It's a perfect job for maniacs, idiots and fools like me.

Until that day when it all started coming apart.

I was in my biggest gig yet, tons of freedom, head of the restaurant, as close as I ever came to living my dream--and it all came apart for me. I was stressed out and overworked, I hadn't taken a relaxing day off in weeks. My roommate and I weren't talking, my girlfriend and I were barely talking, my boss and I were doing more barking than talking. I always had the feeling that I was about to get fired--and once you've got that idea in your head, it poisons every thought you have. Life had that spiraling feeling where you feel like you're losing your grip on everything around you. And one night, I just walked out in the middle of one of the dinner rush on a Friday evening. I laid my keys on the bar for my boss and said I couldn't do this anymore.

I couldn't do it anymore.

And that November night, I decided that the dream was over. I was walking out of the restaurant industry as a career choice for the rest of my life. I didn't want the hours anymore. I didn't want the danger or the thrill anymore. I didn't want that freedom or that much rope anymore.

The way I had defined my life for years and years was over. It was time to come up with something else instead! In the meantime, I had a bit of a self-identity vacuum. For years, I thought of myself as a bartender, cook, manager--whatever. It was part of this "plan" I thought I constructed in my head. It was my self-image. And when that image no longer fit for the way I was looking at the world, I didn't have any other idea to which I could turn. I didn't know who I was, I didn't know how to define myself.

It was awful.

We have all these self-images of ourselves. It's how we project our personalities to others, how we display the people we create ourselves to be. You do the same thing, I promise. There's something about you that says "cool softball guy" or "witty movie wonk" or "proud literary snob" or "down-home country boy" or whatever. Whether it is conscious or subconscious, we all construct these self-identities that we show the rest of the world. Mine was "fun bartender" and it was a REALLY FUN way to live life.

So when the day came to cast aside that identity, I didn't know how to replace it. It was a real, honest to goodness identity crisis. I'd get a job here and there to pay the bills, whether glazing hams for a mail-order meat company or working for my Dad's plumbing company--even waiting tables for a while as the most emotionally detached server that you could ever imagine. I worked for the bank, but never really thought of myself as a banker. I was vacant, to say the least.

Really I still haven't fully recovered from that time. I've got a new direction these days with a decent (if sometimes unfulfilling) job. I'm back in school at nights to build on my bachelor's degree. And with a couple years of trial and error, I think I'm finding a new identity for myself. I'll probably never be the writer that I want to be or the Catholic that I want to be or the husband I want to be or (one day) the father I want to be--but I've got a new set of goals. A new identity. Some of which it appropriate for the blog, some of which is a better story for me to share in person. But finally, I feel like that identity crisis is coming to a close. That this time of personal wandering and confusion might be tidying up its final paragraphs in this section of my story. That this could be a summer of ending--in a refreshingly merciful kind of way.

It's cliché to say that you can't start a new chapter until you've finished writing the old one--and from an author's point of view, that's not even technically true. I offer as proof all the half-written posts on this blog that you cannot see. (Some proof, huh?) But as a metaphor, it's a nice thought. It's time to close this chapter so I can begin a new one.

I think it's going to be a good summer.