![]() Together, Ann and Bill hired colleagues from their previous workplace, people who had also been laid off.Įmboldened by the realization that their power came from inside themselves the couple grew closer than ever. Stunned, Ann gathered her wits, packed her bags - and joined her husband as a fellow broker at a new insurance company, A & B Insurance Corporation, that the couple had founded a few months earlier. “I had to go through a transformational stage, where I said to myself: ‘I don’t know what I am doing or where I am going, or even how to get to the new place. “It was a struggle to give up that identity,” Ann says. After 16 years of work, the director told Ann, her job had been re-classified, and Ann was being laid off. That shift came with the not-so-gentle push from the head of the Human Resources department. Within months of recovering from her heart attack, Ann had to drop yet another construct: The idea that corporate America would always take care of her. Life, however, was not about to let Ann get too comfortable. ![]() “I finally had a mate who loved and treasured me – that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with,” she says, dabbing her eyes. On a recent afternoon in a Barnes & Nobles, Ann’s eyes brim with tears as she talks about her gratitude, even now, 20 years later. Thankfully, she says, she found it in the love of her new blended family. The only way she was able to let go of that self-importance was to simultaneously reach out for something else, something even more supportive. “You think you are the only one who can do something and then you learn – quickly – that isn’t true. Life was good.īut if she was going to be healthy enough to live it, she knew that once again, she would have to adapt to life on life’s newest terms.Īnn knew she had to get rid of her most cherished stronghold: The belief that she was indispensable. About to get re-married, she had widened her life to include her fiancée’s three children and extended family. ![]() ![]() Instead, Ann wound up in a hospital emergency room, where she was admitted as a patient who woke up strapped to a hospital bed because she had hemorrhaged from the angioplasty and the hospital staff had to make sure she didn’t move and dislodge the tubes running through her body.įorty-four years old, she had already experienced her share of life transitions: For starters, she had been married and divorced, hit a financial rock bottom, and raised two children by herself. “I was down in my office working, eating pralines and cream Healthy Choice ice cream and I started to get a little sweaty and feel kind of ‘off.’ I thought I would relax and chill out and be fine.” She was sitting in her home office on a Saturday afternoon, in front of a impossible stack of work that need to get done ASAP. Now, looking back at the pressures and busyness of that time, Ann admits that she anchored herself in the identity of attempting to manage the chaos of it all, and that she rather liked that, being the lead person that so many leaned on for support. ![]() Suddenly, it was as if life leaned in on Ann Nangle and blasted her with more than her heart could handle: The unspeakable joy of a wedding proposal the chaotic renovation of a soon-to-be dream home the unending stress of a 70-hour a week job.Īnn’s response: “I can do it all. ![]()
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