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Susie Welch (7:45)

So it's important here to explain why I was exhausted. 1. It is exhausting to take care of somebody who's dying. It's physically exhausting. I mean, the doctor appointments, the constant pain management, the not sleeping, the trying to get the person you love to eat and maybe you know perfectly well what I'm talking about and if you do, I'm sorry. It's just also, though on another level, it's very exhausting. Psychically, your brain and your nervous system are kind of overloaded and they're shorting out with very bad news and you have a whole out of body experience the entire time in which you're constantly asking how could this possibly be happening to us? And afterwards someone mentioned to me, oh, like in passing, oh, you went through so much trauma while Jack was dying. And I thought, oh, that's what it was. That's the word. Trauma. It is trauma. You don't think of it that way, but it is. But I was actually exhausted for another crazy reason. An unexpected. Unexpected because it was happy. So in 2018, a crazy, wild thing happened, which is that my son Marcus and Jack's grandson Joe, who are about the same age, got together and started a company called Quadio, which was a music tech company for college musicians. And before you know it, they had, like, 50 employees and big corporate clients. And one day, Jack said to me, susie, I think you better get into there and help them, because they are clueless. And I want you to know something. We love these two boys with everything in us, but they were like little bear clubs, and they were running a company with 50 people and big corporate clients. So I went in, and I basically kind of took the reins. There were constantly. There were musicians in the office, and we were throwing concerts, and it was general pandemonium. And the next oldest employee to me was 25, all right. And I was able to be in the office four hours a day. But they were in this terrible period, absolutely glorious hours. They were hopeful, and they were hilarious and filled with life. We thought we were the next big thing, and people kept telling us we were the next big thing, and it kind of felt like, oh, my God, this was really gonna happen. So I was tired in this period because I was also running a startup that was on a rocket ship. It was a lot. A few weeks before Jack died, I did climb off that rocket ship to stay by his side 24 7, as you do. But I was also in that exact same period, out of my phone, running the company on the edges, and it was like just a complete storm inside of my being. And then he died on March 1st. And after his funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral, I did indeed do exactly as I told him. I got into bed. I was just so overwhelmed. I waited till the funeral was over, and I came home, and I literally got under the covers, and I told my son and my grandson, you can do it. You can run the company for now. I'll be back when I can be back. And they were not crazy about that, because I was really helping them. But whatever. They knew I needed time. Two weeks later, the pandemic arrived. It was March 15, and like many other New Yorkers, I got out of the city with my family. We fled to the countryside, and we holed up for all those dark months. There was Not a lot to do. We took a lot of walks, we had a lot of dogs, and we walked them a lot of times every day. Then bit by bit, in 2021 and 2022, everyone started getting back to life and humanity. I also started getting back to life and humanity, very timidly, very experimentally. I started talking to friends about different types of jobs I might pursue, like maybe consulting, maybe going back to tv, maybe for the first time. I might just do full time volunteering with animals and otherwise make myself available to my kids. I didn't know what to do with myself Exactly. I was 60 and my career had been a beautiful, crazy quilt with lots of jobs, but mainly for the previous 20 years, I had worked with and for my husband, writing books and talking about careers on tv. But there was something that I had been thinking about for a long time. It was, ironically, a career discovery methodology called Becoming youg. A methodology for helping people figure out what to do with their lives. So I ended up pitching that idea to the dean at NYU Stern, and he said, okay, we'll. We'll try it. So I started teaching it and it seemed right away to be going very well. The classes were filled with vulnerability and life and laughter and honest questions and sometimes tears. And I asked the students if they would help me learn to teach. And. And they were like, sure, but you seem to be doing okay up there, Professor Welch. Because bottom line, I discovered in the classroom very quickly that I felt completely in my element. But outside the classroom, I had no idea who I was without my husband. No idea of who. Susie.

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Susie Welch (14:11)

So one day in the middle of this period, I was walking my dogs around the pond behind my house, and there appears this gorgeous swan. Ta da. And she is oddly, totally solo. And I say oddly because everyone knows that swans mate for life. It's not only lore, it is the truth. But here was this swan alone. And I know it sounds very Hollywood to say it. Our eyes locked. Our eyes locked. Well, it did not. I'm an animal person to begin with, but it did not take me time to fall in love with this beautiful creature. We adopted each other. Maybe when I would come out of the house to walk the dogs, she would start honking the minute she saw me. And I would say, hi, hi, here I am. And then as I walk the dogs around the pond, she would swim alongside us and she and I would exchange knowing glances and I would chat with her. And, I mean, at least I thought I was. I mean, we were friends and we were allies, she and I. We were two creatures without our other half. And I named her Susie. Okay? Which, as I mentioned earlier, was so upsetting to my kids. They were like, stop that, Mom. It's weird and I get it. But I just felt for her. And I wondered if she felt like I did at night when she was in her nest. And I wondered if she was terribly, terribly lonely under the vast heavenly canopy of the sky. So this went on for months. The honking, hello. And the walks with Susie. And then one day, some friends were over. They lived nearby. And the wife saw Susie just paddling along next to me. She said, oh, did you place this beautiful solo swan here? And I said, no, God did. And she kind of looked at me like I was being a little woo woo. But I still maintained that how could it be? Susie's arrival was not accidental, at least in my mind. So then it was July 4th, and every town around my town had fireworks. It went on all night long. One town would stop and the next town would begin. And I remember it well because all three of my dogs were losing their everlasting minds. I mean, fireworks are terrible for dogs. And it was so bad at one point that I literally got under the bed with them to wait it out. The next morning, July 5, was beautiful and sunny, and at 6:15am as usual, the dogs and I sprung into action for our walk. And we headed straight to the pond. And within about 10 seconds, I knew something was wrong because there was no honking. And I scanned the pond and there was no Susie. And at first I was like, well, maybe she's really worn out from the fireworks. And she's still sleeping. So I literally started running around the pond with the dogs running behind me. And I was like, going, susie, Susie, where are you? And I was asking the dogs, go find Susie. Where's Susie? These are German shepherds. I was like, go find this bird. And we circled the pond like, four or five times with me panting. And then I noticed, like, I was crying, Susie. Suzy. And I was so upset that my beautiful friend, my literal spirit animal, was just gone. So I went back to the house, and I think it was literally the first time I used AI and I described the whole situation. I was in a panic. There's a single swan in my backyard. She was alone, all alone. I fell in love with her. We fell in love with each other. Then there were fireworks, and she disappeared. Is she coming back? And, you know, AI was slower then, like, two years ago, but it eventually answered, and it basically said the fireworks spooked her and she's gone. And I told, typed in, will she come back? And the LLM in the sky said, maybe. I cannot tell you how much I held onto that. Maybe weeks and months passed, and I held on to that, maybe because I wanted my doppelganger back. I mean, Susie the swan. I told myself she was like me. We were profoundly paired people who had become unpaired, and we were just going to go about our lives being assertively and obviously solo in our little ponds. We were professional widows. That was our identity, okay? That was my identity, and I made it her identity because probably as a bird, she had no actual identity issues. You know, I want to assure you I am not a total crackpot here, because the truth is, honestly, I was also watching my relationship with the swan. I was perplexed by it. I knew it was weird, all right? I had never in my life named anything, anything or anyone after me. So I was loving this swan. But I was also thinking, what is up with you loving the swan? Real Susie. And I think what was up was that I was scared, all right? Scared of facing my aloneness. Scared of facing the question, what am I going to do with the rest of my life without Jack and also without a man. I mean, I went from my father's house to getting married at 21 years old. That marriage lasted 15 years, but really, I was just one year on my own before I met Jack and married him. So the truth is, I had never not had a man in my life. I had always been part of a pair. I had never been solo in this world of ours. And I think that is why I felt for Susie the swan so deeply, she and I were, like, navigating new waters together. Or so I thought. Which brings me back to our lovely listener's question. Did she ever come back? No, she didn't. I struggled with it. I'm not gonna lie. Some of my longtime listeners may remember that at the holidays that year, six months after she went away, I said that her return was all I wanted for Christmas. I mean, that was six months later. But over time, the truth is, I surrendered to her departure. I let her go. She needed to go find a better place for her, for her future. And when I let her go, I literally thought to myself, it's your turn, real Susie. Now, this is definitely not leading to me saying I left the professional widow Susie to go find a mate, as the swan Susie might have. But I did leave the professional widow Susie to become Susie, a new Susie. Who could possibly be someone who was the widow of Jack Welch, but also her own person entirely. A professor, an inventor, an entrepreneur, a leader, a woman not unpaired, but alone and at peace with it, which I am. I am. How did it happen? It happened because I decided it had to. Yes, I made a literal decision. I was like, I cannot every day wake up with this unease, with this dis Ease with who I am. But then one day after class, a student came up to me. She was a great student, very lively, very engaged. And she said to me, professor Welch, I love this class. But when I go home and tell my boyfriend, he blows me off. He's a traitor on Wall Street. He thinks he knows everything. And he says, she's only teaching it stern because her husband was famous. Well, well, well. I guess I knew some people thought that. That I was some kind of celebrity hire. But when becoming you got very successful as a class and I was appointed to the faculty, I had hoped that maybe that narrative went away. That narrative that I was just the other half of someone. The unpaired swan, so to speak. That night after school, on the subway home, I was mad, but I was jubilant. This was the shove I needed. I thought, I am not just an unpaired swan. I think I want to show up and do work in this world that proves that I want to show up that way. I want to show up in a way, in that way, in a million ways. I had been thinking about writing Becoming youg the Book. And suddenly I was like, I am writing Becoming you, the book. And I sat down at the computer that weekend, people had been urging me to start a podcast on my own. I was like, yeah, I'm gonna do a podcast. And we built a studio. And I was dancing around the idea of starting Becoming youg Labs. That's the company that now brings becoming you all around the world. And I suddenly thought, yes, I can do that and I will do that. I started to build the team that week and I thought, I am done with waiting to figure out who I am. I here's the thing. I decided to be done with the fear. I decided to start operationalizing the future. And I did that. And as I did that, I finally understood what Jack had been telling me when he said, go get your life back. He had known, I think, long before I did, that I was in danger of staying an unpaired swan because I was afraid of what it meant not to be. Look, we do not happen by accident. We ourselves, we do not grow and evolve and become by accident. We do not overcome our fears of self actualization by accident. We do not creep past our resistance to change by accident. All those things happen on purpose. We happen on purpose. Susie the swan left to begin her new life on purpose. And I did too. I will never forget her, but I am happy for her wherever she has gone. So here we are at the end of the story and the end of our series on the fear of becoming. And so here is my question for you. Are you waiting for you to happen? Is fear holding you down or back? It will do that. It will. Until you alone decide it cannot and will not anymore. And that you are ready to become you at last. Sam.