Unwavering Support

One, singular backpack. This is all I take on most of my flights. Doesn’t matter if it’s a one overnight or a week long trip. As an engineer, I am always looking for efficiency. There’s something about efficiency that’s really satisfying. I’m also really guilty of being visibly frustrated when I know something could be done more efficiently by someone else. My parents and sisters know this all too well.

In this season of my life, I have been traveling in addition to my dedicated work travel to visit my boyfriend. Late 2018 at 34 years old, he decided he wanted to pursue his dream career of becoming a commercial pilot. Mostly this was my doing and this shouldn’t come as a surprise. I am always everyone else’s best hype girl. He was in this weird spot in his current career as a production manager for an extreme sports marketing company. We sat down and had a completely real conversation about where things were at in his life and what he envisioned going forward.

I am in love with my job. I haven’t always been, but it’s been an interesting road to figure it out. I want that for all of the people in my life. It’s quite honestly the most fulfilling thing I have experienced (to date). See, I grew up with my mother as a stay at home mom, and my dad working crazy hours at Motorola. It wasn’t until Motorola went through a rather large change, that I started to pay attention to the careers of my parents.

When that change came along, my mom went back to work at a credit union branch after taking 14 years off to raise us. My mom loved her job as a stay at home mom and I think she really enjoyed her time at the credit union for the first few years. I watched my dad move from a consulting position to working as an internal consultant. In their fifties, they aren’t in love with what they do, but they work to sustain our family’s needs and I deeply appreciate that. Seeing this frustration from my parents and knowing that the future might not mean children for me, I made it a point to find a significant way to help others to really lead a more fulfilling life through my career.

I asked my boyfriend this simple question: “Imagine you’re older. What’s something you wish you would have achieved in your lifetime?” Top Gun is our favorite movie as a couple, so I threw out flying as an option. He had an Air Force ROTC scholarship to the Illinois Institute of Technology on the south side of Chicago at 18 years old. He studied electrical engineering for two years, and the government finally told him that he wouldn’t be able to fly the fighter jets due to his eyesight. Lasik surgery was not as advanced as it is now. Like any other 20 year old guy would have, he said screw this, and changed his major. For ten years, he had been a personal trainer at an elite gym until one of his clients hired him into his production team.

His brain immediately registered “flying” as he envisioned he would. He talked about all the reasons why he couldn’t go back into the service to pursue that dream. I, having a bunch of friends in the airline industries and being a standby passenger for a few years, pointed out that he didn’t necessarily have to fly for the Air Force. It was like a light bulb went off in his head. I still remember this moment: we were sitting at TGI Friday’s in Buffalo Grove with a Stella and a long island iced tea and he looked like he had just actually opened his eyes for the very first time.

It didn’t take much to make this a realization for him. Granted, I did ask “hey, did you check out those flight school programs yet?” “hey, did you apply to those schools yet?” “hey, did you check out financing options yet?” “hey, have you looked at housing options yet?” MANY times. I had been in B2B sales for a few years, so follow up doesn’t bug me, even when I sound like a broken record. I think the more important thing to realize here is that as I was asking those questions, I was really saying “hey, I still believe in you, what steps do you need to take to make your dream a reality”. It made him feel like he had someone in his corner looking out for him, especially when he got distracted for hours playing his favorite video games. Sometimes it just takes a nudge.

As we solidified our research, we decided that in order to be efficient and streamline this dream (commercial pilots have a flying expiration date too), the flight school in Texas would be the best option. This was not really part of our plan. We had only been dating for a year and we had really only started to get into the weeds of the relationship. He had previous failed long-term relationships and I had some commitment issues (more on that later). My job is flexible, but at the time there was so much I was handling on an office level outside of my engineering role that needed to be seen to fruition. After talking about this extensively, we decided that in order to make this work, we would have to do long distance and we would have to be in it for the long haul. My move is scheduled for early 2020, so in the meantime we see each other about once a month.

My takeaway from this story is really this: unwavering mutual support for each of our dreams has been the one thing that has really kept us feeling so connected even at a physical distance. Knowing you have someone in your corner cheering for you when you work through the hard seasons makes the dream seem more achievable because you don’t feel like you’re in it alone. He has been my go-to phone call on my way home from the office on the harder days. I’ve been his cheerleader when the learning curve for accelerated curriculum flight school is taking a toll on him. Truly, from what I know, it’s like drinking from a fire hose.

As humans, we just want to connect with someone and have comfort knowing we’re not in the journey of life alone. I look forward to where our journey will take us – quite literally, since we can really go anywhere in the world after this. Here’s to the most incredible adventure with only the best at my side!