In the past 12 months, creative leader and life coach Cassie Roma has gone through a divorce, a job change, moved countries and grieved her best friend. She talks to Capsule about the power of starting over at 42, the humbling nature of change and why she thinks so many women are currently going through a period of flux.
“The question I get most of the time from other women is ‘I’ve made the decision in my head and in my heart. I know I have to change the job, or leave the marriage. But… how?’”
As a creative leader and life coach, Cassie Roma is used to fielding these kind of questions from people in her life. How to follow through on the voice in your head that is telling you that a change is needed, a voice that is getting louder by the day? How do you – there’s no real way to sugar coat this – blow up your life, because you know that the rebuilding holds more promise than the thin-ice comfort you’re currently living in?
Well, as someone who has gone through a divorce, a job shift, a country shift and grieving a best friend in the past 12 months, Cassie will tell you.
“Whether people call it courageous, or crazy, all I can think of is that this has been the most humbling year of my life,” she says. “I’ve never felt more broken, or at ease, simultaneously.”
When Change Comes Calling
This time a year ago, Cassie got the phone call we all dread getting – her terminally ill friend was going downhill, fast. His wife told Cassie to get on a plane to come and say goodbye. Her friend, Pete Nelson, was back in California, where Cassie is originally from. For the past two decades, she’s worked between the US and Auckland, after moving to NZ in her 20s. But the thing with a phone call like that is that time really is of the essence; when the most available flight was still two days away, Cassie said the reality of expat life really hit her.
In the process of downsizing her life, there was a lot of thinking “what the f—k have I done?”
“In that moment, you’re like ‘I’m too far away.’ My parents are getting older, my brother’s got four kids, I’m not going to see Pete again… what is going on?” Luckily, Pete rallied and the pair got to spend three weeks together, having all of the final conversations you hope to have with your long-term best friend.
“One of the things he left me with was that you have to be happy,” Cassie says. “I asked him a few times, what does 80 years feel like? And he told me it felt like that” [she clicks her fingers]. “So I knew I had to make a lot of really big changes. And that was going to include coming back to America, focusing on my daughter Chelsea… and also knowing that I was in a marriage that wasn’t going to last.”
Two days after Pete died, Cassie asked her wife Carly for a divorce. Three days after that, they started separating and Cassie started packing up 20 years of her life into six boxes – three of which she would eventually jettison along the way. In the process of downsizing her life, there was a lot of thinking “what the f—k have I done?” she laughs. She and her daughter moved back to San Diego, back to the house that Cassie grew up in, and started over. It was a turbulent time that prompted a lot of big questions.
“How do you view yourself, without the title, without the being known, without your chosen friends and family surrounding you?” she says. “How do you define yourself when you are alone?” Ironically, Cassie laughs, these are the kind of questions her clients are often asking her. “It’s like being a builder, right? Yours is the last house to fix.”
“How do you view yourself, without the title, without the being known, without your chosen friends and family surrounding you? How do you define yourself when you are alone?”
It was only after a whirlwind trip to Australia and back to NZ this year that Cassie says she has started feel at home in her new life. “Today I was blow drying my hair and dancing in the mirror – do you know how long it’s been since I danced in the mirror? Since I danced, or sang, or found joy in the moment? It’s only when you start to feel that again that you realise the depth of how hard change really is.”
Going Through Survival Mode
This idea of hitting midlife and suddenly needing a big change is not a new one, but anecdotally, it feels like a movement that is gathering steam right now. It’s particularly relevant for women who white-knuckled it through unsatisfying jobs or tenuous relationships during the early pandemic years, only to come out the other side and wonder ‘is this all there is?’
Cassie says there is precedent for this in the professional field – looking at the science of brands and marketing, she says there is usually a “two year mark where we can handle our shit, where we can move with change and grow, and now we’re hitting the end of that cycle.”
The timing fits – if 2020 to 2022 was purely about survival, then 2022 to 2024 was about coping. So what comes after that? “This is the beginning of the crumbling,” Cassie says, then laughs. “I’ve just always been the first one off the mark.”
The crux of the coaching she has done in the past four years, Cassie says, has been mostly with high-level executives, and mostly women. “This is the point we all reach – that juncture of our life – that maybe Covid highlighted for us – where we start to look around and go ‘Wait a minute – how do I view success? What does legacy look like? Am I enough? What is the mark I’m making? Do I like consumerism? Am I spending enough time with my kids? Do I like my spouse? Do I like myself?’”
For Cassie, it was the combination of mentally – and logistically – preparing for her daughter to start university, and the realisation of how fast those 18 years have gone, paired with the loss of her friend Pete, and his wisdom of just how fast his 80 years had gone.
“If I get to Pete’s age of 80, well, that’s only 38 more trips around the sun,” she says. “We don’t have that long – 80 years is not long, 100 years is not long. This is the juncture.”
Sitting in the messy middle of change is where Cassie is now, thinking about what does it look like to be single for the first time in her adult life. She was engaged for her first marriage at 21, and then existed her second marriage at 41. “The second I started to spend more time by myself, [I realised] I just needed to be on my own. And once I realised that, it was like ‘how can I do all of this with kindness?’”
The coping mechanisms that have helped with this transitional time have included Tina Turner, yelling while swimming underwater, giving away most of her belongings, and quality time with her daughter. There was even an impromptu tattoo that came from a brief foray back into dating, which now serves as a reminder of being alive, Cassie laughs. But it’s also a reminder that situations change, and that’s okay. When it comes to big, life-altering moments, we’re used to the movie montage that shows it all happen on fast forward. But real life requires a lot more patience.
“This shit can crush you, and you don’t always have the perfect lesson to package up and say ‘but here’s what I learned,’” Cassie says. “When you’re in the mud, it’s okay to be in the mud. To feel it, and to be able to tell yourself, ‘it’s cool, you’re sad, your heart is broken, you’re lost… it’s okay. Just sit here, have a big, ugly, weepy snotty cry, and don’t try to figure it out. Just feel it. It’s been a really beautiful unravelling, and coming home to just… feeling it all.”