Starting Over Takes Heavy Toll
Everybody tells you it’s a great deal, you’d be crazy to pass up “the package.” The company is desperate to downsize, and the offer of premature retirement is tempting. But freedom can be a terrifying burden.
Gary Whelpley had come to Kodak straight from school. A photographer, he viewed his existence as the picture-perfect layout of successful adulthood - candids of him shooting pictures for the company all over the world, a blowup of his solid suburban home, the dynamic businesswoman wife, and himself, tanned and rugged and totally secure - until the day he caught the last train out and watched, helpless, while his whole life crashed.
“Once I took the package and left, I realized what an incredible part of my life that company was,” lamented Whelpley. “It was my friends, my support system. I knew that every day I was going to get up and go to the same place. I was set. I loved the company; it gave me everything that I ever dreamed of. These last two years - they’ve been like a death for me.”
But the Gary Whelpley who now occupies a tiny matchbox of a house, while he is in the transition of divorce, is far more provocative and alive-looking than any company-man portrait. Having weaned himself from the company’s “yellow blood,” he now wears a bold flowered shirt and a big silver ring and keeps his pewtered hair youthfully scissored. But the hardest part of the “little death” of his First Adulthood has been to realize that he almost killed his creativity in exchange for making it into management status.
“Looking for total security was making me sick with frustration,” Whelpley claims. Once he left, he looked beneath his picture-book life and said, “Where’s the meaning?” Where was the artist and dreamer he had left behind?
“I get up now and think, ‘I can do anything I want. My God, how can this be?’ That freedom is the scariest freakin’ thing in the world!”
It is not easy to transform oneself from an institutionalized team player into a self-promoting entrepreneur. Although Gary was about to turn 50, he refused to be in a hurry to produce. He decided to give himself a couple of years to seek serenity and balance and to look for a way to give a little something back.
He has found a church that truly reaches the community. “I walk in there, and I feel there’s a place for me to contribute, something I’ve never felt before.” Gary’s thoughts turned more and more toward the children of his first marriage, the scattered seed; he hadn’t seen them more than once or twice a year since his first divorce. His daughter was 8 then.
“To have meaning in my relationships with my three kids is now my major drive. You don’t know how many years you’ll have left. My father died when I was very small, and I never got to say good-bye.” Gary had recently spent two weeks with his 29-year-old daughter. “Just intimate sharing - it’s a good thing to do. I feel it helps me to do the work of this transition.”
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate