Getting Short

I’m starting to get that familiar old feeling: I’m a short-timer.

“Short-timer” is the feeling you get when a period in your life is approaching its anticipated end. Most often it’s about the looming end of a job or of living in a particular place. You know the end is coming soon, and a big change is approaching. Your time in the current job or place is short.

You might have thought about such a change earlier, but it was not certain or was still rather distant. Now the change is real, and you can see it on the horizon. There is excitement, but there is also some fear. The key is to control and minimize the fear while embracing the excitement and letting it energize you.

The reason I have that short-timer feeling is that I am coming to the end of one of the longest periods of my life. In just a little more than a week, I will leave the company I have been working with in one form or another for 11 and a half years, full-time for almost five. And even more significantly I am leaving Ukraine in just about a month, ending an “adventure” that began in 2006 and became full-time in mid-2008. But more about that later in this post.

In the Navy

The first time I was really aware of being a short-timer was when I was in the navy and stationed on the island of Guam. My assignment on Guam, as well as my enlistment in the navy, was coming to an end in December. I was going to be leaving behind a tropical paradise I had become very used to for 18 months and saying goodbye to some of the best friends I had ever had up to that point in my young life.

That year and a half on Guam was one of the most influential times in my life. It shaped me in many ways: some good, some not so good. Early in that time I suffered what was probably the most gut-wrenching emotional trauma of my life (it didn’t happen on the island), and when I returned to the island after dealing with it, I fully embraced the “sex, booze and rock ‘n roll” lifestyle with my friends. But it was just a “crutch” to try to deal with what had happened earlier. They were many wild times, and toward the end I found myself growing tired of the partying and found a new crutch: religion.

I left the life I knew on Guam for one of uncertainty. I returned “home” to Massachusetts for a time, but I had no idea what I would do next. I missed my life on Guam, especially being in frigid New England in the middle of winter and with no friends. I was totally lost. I was insecure. By March, I had agreed to reenlist in the navy with the promise of being sent to language school and becoming an intelligence analyst.

But I still remember the short-timer feeling during the last month or two on Guam. While there was some excitement at the approaching change, there was actually a lot more fear. What was coming after Guam was unknown; I had no plan, no dream. It was a black hole.

The next time I really felt that short-timer feeling was years later when I was wrapping up my six years in Japan, as well as ending my overall navy service. This time, however, I knew what I was heading into: I was going to return to Colorado and attend Colorado State University to finish my degree.

It was all planned and set, so there wasn’t that same “black hole” feeling, but there were still some uncertainties. I was almost 30 and had not really lived as a civilian for most of my adult life up to that point. Plus, I was headed back to a marriage relationship that had never really worked, and I seriously doubted that it could be made to work. You can’t “reinvigorate” something that never really had any vigor.

Although I had plans and knew where I was headed, there was still that odd feeling of having the days wind down toward the inevitable departure date. I had begun to chafe at certain aspects of military life by then, but I did enjoy the intellectual challenge of my work in navy intelligence. I was very good at what I did and got a lot of accolades for it. I would miss that feeling of importance, and I would also miss keeping tabs on all those “commie” ships and aviation units. I had gotten to know some of them so well that they almost seemed like old friends.

Leaving the University

I spent two and a half years at Colorado University completing my degree. Although there were some difficult times, like getting divorced just a few months after I had arrived from Japan, my years at CSU were some of the best of my life, in many ways even better than Guam. Fort Collins at that time was a wonderful place to live. I had my motorcycle, I had some really special friends, I enjoyed the university environment and had more good times then I can count. And I found – and lost – the most significant love of my life.

In that final spring, as graduation was approaching and big changes were looming right behind it, I again began to feel that short-timer feeling. I was leaving a fairly carefree and fun life and headed into the world of regular work days and all that comes with that. I had a job lined up, but still I felt some trepidation about the change. I wasn’t confident that it was all going to work out – and for good reason.

There have been some other short-time situations along the way: leaving the Colorado Lottery and leaving Colorado to return to Massachusetts for a time, leaving the company I worked for there and Massachusetts two years later to return to Colorado, and leaving MTB, the project management company I worked at before I made the move to Ukraine.

Leaving my house in the mountains was a different sort of feeling. I didn’t really face the reality of it until the last few days when I packed up my stuff and drove away.

Leaving Ukraine

And now, here I am as a short-timer again. I have been talking or writing about making a big change for years, but only last year I finally began to make it a reality. I have known for some time that I would be leaving in early 2020 and I set the timetable just after New Year. It began to really hit me in mid-January when I scheduled my last courses at EPAM. It felt strange to know that this would be the last time I would do these courses, and these students would be my last.

And as the time has grown closer, I’ve been feeling it more and more. A few weeks ago I started purging my stuff. I sold my bike and have arranged to sell or give away a number of other things I have collected over the past decade to create a comfortable home here. I can’t take them with me, so better to find good homes for them. But the process of doing this really drives home the reality of the end being very nearly here.

One aspect of being a short-timer that has never really affected me, however, is falling into the “don’t care” mode and just doing the bare minimum at work. In the military, it was common for short-timers to be the least reliable workers. In combat situations (which I never faced) it was understood that once you got short, you had to do everything possible to avoid putting yourself in danger so that you could just survive those final weeks and days.

I don’t think that way. Perhaps in a combat situation I would, but in normal work situations, I’ve always been fully engaged right to the end. In the past few weeks I have still found myself tweaking and improving parts of my courses, as I always have, and even creating a few new things.

This will probably be the last time I will really have this short-timer feeling. I don’t imagine I will ever again be in such a situation. I see the remainder of my life as being more of a free-flowing, independent endeavor in which I do what I want to do where I want to do it (finances permitting). I guess that is fitting because in reality, I have never been a very “settled” kind of person. Staying in one place, as I have for the past decade, seems to be contrary to who I am, and it is probably why I have often felt so much anxiety here for the past few years. I have been overdue to make a change.

So I am short. And very soon everything is going to change. I am excited, though not as much as in my younger years. And I have a bit of fear, but again not as much as a few other times. What I do notice about this time is more sadness than usual. I am not sad to be leaving the company or Ukraine, but I know that there are a few people here whom I am really going to miss – a lot. Leaving them behind is the hardest part.

But that’s life. It’s a short-timer thing.

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