Revisiting the 3-3-3 rule

Since my life entered endless Major Transition Mode four years ago, I’ve written a birthday post every October to mark the developments. That ritual gave me an opportunity to reflect on how far I had come, and how much a mere 12 months can contain.

There was the one that commemorated a life-redefining, soul-turned-inside-out-ing, self-trajectory-altering year (54: Don’t dream it’s over) and one that was so bursting with juiciness and sex and big giant leaps that I had to split it into two parts (55, Part 1: It was the hottest of times, it was the dumbest of times and Part 2: A trip to Paris and a rendezvous (or two)). Then I came back down to earth and recapped how I had spent the previous year trying to understand my career, what I valued, and how I spent my money (56: The year I found my worth).

Last October I initially forgot to write one. I had viewed the previous year as a slow motion car crash of isolation, low key depression, career whiplash, all topped off by a complete lack of patience for spending even one more minute in Vermont. But that’s part of the ritual, I realized, you can’t just share the highlights and not the low (✨57✨: A meditation on a loser year).

Buried far down in that essay is something I had learned about rescue dog adoption, called the 3-3-3 rule. I realized almost immediately that it also applied astonishingly well to our complex human lives. It was easy to overlay the major life transitions we might come up against — starting a new job, surviving a breakup, and (hello) uprooting your life — onto this structure.

For now, here’s an excerpt from that piece as a refresher:

Start here: 3-3-3 rule of dog adoption.

The short version is that the 3-3-3 rule “is a guideline for transitioning a rescue dog into their new home and helping them to settle in. It suggests that the first three days should be used for adjusting to their new surroundings, the next three weeks for training and bonding, and the first three months for continued socialization and training.” The purpose of the 3-3-3 rule is also to help set expectations for the new owner, so they don’t overwhelm their new pup or give up on them too soon.

When I saw this rule, I realized I had unwittingly embraced a similar cadence when I would start a new job, back in the day when everything was onsite and always full-time. I’d schedule my first day of work on a Wednesday. I knew I’d feel overwhelmed, confused, and stressed, not knowing where anything was or how to do anything those first few days. Starting on a Wednesday made jumping in feel a bit more manageable, because the weekend was so close. At three weeks I’d know where the coffee and bathrooms were, I’d have a basic understanding of who my key coworkers were and the projects I was working on. I’d know my routine. And at three months? I always felt like I was officially In The Job, more comfortable and basically capable or at least on my way to getting there.

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I think many major life disruptions and transitions map to this, too. There is overwhelm, the presentation of a new reality. There is getting your sea legs about you, and beginning to accept the new reality. And then there is fully (or mostly) settling into it, a new normal.

What I’ve realized over this past year, and especially over just the past month, is that there is another 3 that keeps popping up in my life. Three years. It took me three years to fully get over being laid off from my last full-time job, three years to recover from the worst friend breakup I’ve ever had. And now, three years to finally release this period of nonstop intense change and big raging feelings. The opposite of love isn’t hate, of course. Love and hate are both intense, ever-present, haunting in different ways. The opposite of love is resolution. Absence, perhaps. I don’t think about you at all. Freedom. Whether that’s a job you loved, or a friend, or a former life.

I have no idea how I will feel once I’m in Portland and absorb that I actually live there, that I’m not just visiting. I don’t know how I will feel once I fully settle into the fact that this three-year process is finally over. I don’t know how I’ll feel once I register that this place I wanted to get away from for so long — the same place that I also loved, where I raised my kids, where I met some of the most important people in my life — is 3000 miles away. I know I will be happy to be in Portland, I could not be more excited to get there, but no big decisions in life are clean, are they?

Anyway, I can’t think about all of that now. I still have packing to do.

^ That last line: let me share some highly technical analysis (please try to keep up!) when I say: ooooooooof.

I wasn’t thinking about how things would turn out when I landed here, because I assumed that the hardest parts would be over when I left Vermont. I wasn’t thinking about what might be challenging about leaving my entire life behind, because every time I thought about being in Portland I felt so damn excited and I guess I felt like I didn’t deserve any lightness yet? I put an enormous amount of weight on everything simply working out once I arrived, because I couldn’t afford (literally, figuratively) to entertain any other possible outcome.