29: Amy Davidson, on Moving Home, Processing Loss, and Leaving Well
Amy graduated from U Penn with a bachelor’s degree in English and a masters degree in Reading/Language arts and her first career was teaching as the Reading Specialist and classroom teacher in New York City. She pivoted careers to pottery and sculpture as she was raising her family and then transitioned to a role that didn’t involve an office or a boss when she created It’s Your Move, a concierge moving service.
The client specialty of It’s Your Move was helping older people transition from their “big” house to a smaller space, guiding them through the process of sorting through and clearing out items they either couldn’t use or didn’t want. As Amy said about her experience with their clients: “I learned a great deal about how people process change, loss, and how they almost always find their way to a lighter, happier place.”
“Forgiveness is really very powerful. And we sometimes forgive other people, but we forget to forgive ourselves.”
Additional Quotes:
It can be painful and also be valuable, and strengthening. It can be a good thing. I got through that, I can get through this. Then joy begins to come into it, because it doesn't control you, you control it.
I think regret is a really terrible emotion. And if you leave something and you left something unfinished, that can nag at you. If there's something you want to say to somebody, say it. If you love them, tell them you love them. If you got a bug to pick, pick it, say it, live truthfully.
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Transcript:
Forgiveness is really a very powerful tool. And we sometimes forgive other people, but we forget to forgive ourselves.
This is Leaving Well, where we unearth and explore the realities of leaving a job, role, project, or title with intention and purpose, and when possible, Joy. I'm Naomi Hattaway, your host. I will bring you experiences and lessons learned about necessary endings in the workplace with nuanced takes from guests on topics such as grief, confidence, leadership, and career development.
Braided Throughout will be solo episodes sharing my best practices and leaving well for
Amy Davidson graduated from UPenn with a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in reading and language arts. Her first career was teaching as the reading specialist and classroom teacher in New York City. She pivoted careers to pottery and sculpture as she was raising her family and then transitioned to a role that didn't involve an office or a boss when she created It's Your Move, a concierge moving service.
The client's specialty of It's Your Move was helping older people transition from their big house to a smaller space, also guiding them through the process of sorting through and clearing out items they either couldn't use or didn't want. As Amy said about her experience with their clients, I learned a great deal about how people process change, loss, and how they almost always find their way to a lighter, happier place.
Amy, I am so glad to have this conversation and I would love to start us off with you telling me in your words about your own transition or change story. I think the transition to It's Your Move was really a particularly good one because sometimes life just throws things at you, you have no choice.
We've moved a lot, um, not always because we wanted to, but when I decided to stop teaching, I really gave myself the space to think about what kind of space I wanted to work in and what kind of work I wanted to do. Teaching is a giving profession, so that, the part of giving in terms of relocating and helping people transition was easy.
I realized that I, I get a little bored. Easily. So having new clients was always fun. I wasn't really sure if it was even possible to do this because nobody does what I and my partner did. I thought, well, let's give it a shot and see if it's actually what I think it's going to be. And I knew a realtor who had a client who desperately, desperately wanted to move and she needed to move and she just couldn't.
She was absolutely paralyzed, and whenever she started to talk about it, she would become very emotional and start crying, and then just wasn't moving forward. I spent the summer working with her, and the first day I went into her house, and she was very, very nervous. We talked for about 45 minutes, and then I said, well, is there anything that I can look at?
Because she wouldn't let me go into any rooms. And she said, you can look at the front hall closet. So, and she was shaking. I opened the closet and I said, yeah, it's clouded. And she said, oh, look, it's horrible. I said, no, no, no, everybody has this closet. Everybody who has dogs has leashes. Everybody who has animals have pet hair.
That's just life. This is no different. And little by little, she would let me go into another space. And one day we went to the basement. She took out a box and she just started sobbing. And I said, okay, everything stops now. What's going on? She opened the box and there was some dried flowers. And then she told me the story of her sister and her sister's death and how these flowers represented so much.
It was not a box of dried flowers. And we talked for hours about her life and her sister and her divorce and her child. And then she said, you know, I don't think I need these. And we did this for an entire summer. We worked for three or four hours, and then she was just overwhelmed. And got a dumpster, which is my happy, happy space.
And one day, I said, you know, you have 40 white shirts. She said, what? I said, you have 40 white shirts. And she said, I don't need 40 white shirts. I said, I know, but you have them. And the thing that happens with, and this happens to every single client, there's a moment Where you can see them getting lighter and the things that they were holding on to, the things that were holding on to them begin to loosen their grip.
Sometimes it becomes almost an elation. I mean, people will start, you know, getting rid of everything. Uh, sometimes people will get rid of one thing and then rethink it and have to take it back. But I learned that the three words that you were going to ask me, three words, were intentionality, patience, So when you, any transition, you, I think you need to give yourself permission to stay in whatever that space is for enough time, but not too much time.
And that's where I come in. So if somebody is really stuck, this woman was really stuck, but what she really needed was to tell her story and have it validated. And then the things were not part of her, but they were before. And I think that's true of all kinds of transitions. Um, our family right now has just lost the matriarch.
96 years old, the grandchildren have never known a day in their life without her. And they're in the, I just want to go into the closet and hug her clothes and smell her stage. It's really important to have that stage. Things can become more important than they should be. And people sometimes attach some of their personality and their hopes and their ideas and their wishes to those things.
So it's, it's a delicate dance to work with somebody and help them understand the value of the thing. The use of the thing. So, you have to have patience to do that. You have to have an intention of, I'm going to move, or I'm going to clear this closet out, or whatever it is. But you have to make the decision that you're going to do it.
That's often the hardest part, because once you've really made a decision, the rest, the doing is easy. It's the getting to that decision. So, that can take a lot of time. But once you start, then you have to give yourself permission to experience it. So you don't open the drawer and dump it into a box. You have to open the drawer and take the things out and look at them, and decide whether or not they're important to you.
Everything can't be equally important. So right now in our family, the grandchildren, everything's important. The newspapers are as important as the toothbrush, which is as important as the jewelry. And that will pass. And if it doesn't pass, then you have, that's when you need maybe some support to talk about why.
Why is, why is the shower curtain the thing you are thinking about? And that's where joy comes in when you, when you get through that and you start to really evaluate, you know, what, what is that? Do I love that bowl because it was my mother's? And every time I see it, I just. Feel my mother's presence that's a valuable object because it's not it's about a lot of things and you can take that with you Most people really hate moving Even if they even if they know where they're going and even they want to go there they it's completely overwhelming So, you know, that's where if you give yourself the space and time to and acknowledge that those feel you're overwhelmed I don't know how I'm gonna start.
This is impossible. And that's true of lots of different, you know, somebody dies I don't know how I'm gonna get through this Your kid goes to college, your space is transformed. It has no choice. It has to be. And if you If you accept that that is, that is part of the journey of life, that's part of what we live, and we do, and we experience.
It can be painful, and also be valuable, and strengthening. It can be a good thing. I got through that, I can get through this. Then joy begins to come into it, because it doesn't control you, you control it. So something that was really interesting as you were talking, Amy, is the idea of just so much compassion that comes through from you sharing about the work that you've done.
You know, you said at the beginning, no one else does what you do with It's Your Move, and I think I would offer that it. No one else does what you do, even if someone did replicate the moving service. You're bringing such compassion and like you said, patience. And when I work with my clients, it's often just decision confidence that they need, or they need someone to sit with them long enough to work through.
And I love that you talked about the permission of feeling the big feelings, because I think we like to skip over feelings and emotions when it comes to transitions. It would be frightening, you know, because if, if, if you're If you're relocating, there's a reason that, and sometimes it's, it's wonderful, joyful, you know, I, I, I'm moving to a big new house and we've got, you know, whatever, if you're, if you're stuck in a space and you keep going around in the same circle.
Then you need to, you need to maybe step back or step aside. And I, I always look at problems. If I'm, if I'm stuck, I think, well, why, let's walk around to the other side of the circle and let's look at it from either somebody else's perspective or, and maybe that will help me shift if I need, if I want to shift and I don't know how.
The other thing we had, which was just a miracle, there was a fellow. Who started in a program for afterschool kids in the south side of Chicago who are at risk. All of these kids lived in shelters. But he also worked with agencies that placed these kids and their families in apartments. They have nothing.
I had clients who had a lot of stuff. And what I found, because I would call Ron and say, Ron, I got a really good client here. She's got four beds. She has a couch. She's got towels and paper, you know, everything. And he would come up, pack it all up in a van and take it down. And then he'd take pictures when the kids, you know, moved in.
When people know that their things are going to someone, they are much, much more comfortable letting it go. Putting it in the Catholic Charities box or calling up, you know, 800 junk and just getting rid of it for many people is just not possible. But if you take the 482 National Geographics that somebody had, and he knows it's going to a library, then he helps you put them in the box.
Once they trusted you, they would start telling you their secrets. Things I couldn't share with anybody else. One guy, he said, Okay, you have to come to the basement and you can't yell at me. I said, I don't yell at clients. He opens a drawer. He hands me a box. It's cancelled checks from the diaper service.
I said, How old is your son? Sixty. So do you have the checks from the diaper service when your child is 60 years old? He said, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with them. I said, this bank doesn't exist anymore. You can throw them away. He said, yeah, I can just throw them away. I said, no one is going to go through your garbage and take a 60 year old check out and do anything with it.
So sometimes it's permission. That people don't know the rules. I have to save everything for 10 years. No, you don't. Some of that is very liberating. And then they're so happy that they start turning everything out because they've been keeping, you know, their credit card statements since 1960. And the joy that people get from knowing that they have done something good for someone else.
It's a great motivator. It takes them out of themselves. It takes them away from the, Oh, I really love that platter, but I have 12 platters and I don't need 12. But if I know I'm giving that platter to somebody who doesn't have one, then I give it with great joy. Is there, I'm curious if there is something that you knew inherently when you started It's Your Move that you grew or learned through as you worked with clients?
Because I'm guessing that a lot of what you started It's Your Move with was just your knowing. Of how to navigate this was anything a surprise, I guess, is maybe my question as you Oh my gosh, there's so much porn. Oh, I cannot tell you how much porn there is an old people's houses. It's so reassuring. I mean, it was really funny we had to come up with a system for how are we going to deal with this so we'd say okay Mike, we finished this closet tomorrow we're going to go over to the cabinet.
If you want us to leave a box, because you might have stuff you want to, you know, you know, get right away when you move. I'll get it. I got the box. I got it. I got it. And you know, we didn't, sometimes they'd move it to another place. Like we weren't going to find it when we got to that place. But that was, that was a surprise.
I was actually surprised at how often almost everybody at some point crosses the bridge to joy. Some fight it. Some really, really resist it. Because sometimes you like to be in a place that's comfortable, which you know, for some people it might be. An unhappy place, but there is a moment where they, they do it and you can see it in their eyes and you can feel it.
And I didn't un, I didn't even think about that when we first started this business. Um, there wasn't, I just thought, well, I'm really good at this and, and I, what I bring is I can calm you down and say, I know how to do this. I didn't know there was gonna be so much emotion and, and relationships that we, we, uh, developed over, you know, and, and we have hilarious.
Even these old ladies go, you gotta get the girls. Got to get the girls over, like, all right, because the other thing is, because we thought about franchising it, but what we represented to our clients were either, we looked like their sister or their mother or their aunt or their cousin. We're very familiar and that calms people down.
Having a movie man come in and pack your books, they're putting books in the box. But having somebody come over and go, wow, look at that. Do you know that author? I love that author. That's, that's a different experience. And people share, they love to share their stories. And the older you get, there are two things that happens, like a lot of things happen, but when you get to be like assisted living old, one is no one touches you.
The older you get, the less you're touched and the more you need it. So the other thing we did was we, we did a lot of, you know, hugging and a lot of hand holding and a lot of just, just being together physically. And if you're sick, then they know no one touches you. No surprise that my, actually my fourth career, which didn't, I ended up not doing, was as a massage therapist.
About five years ago, I went back and went to massage school, which was fun. People get lonely, and people don't ask them their stories. And old people especially, I happen to love old people. But when you give someone time, and you just say, You know, so tell me your story, what's going on? You know, where are you from?
It is the easiest thing to do. What you get back is just priceless. It's really wonderful. Well, I'm hearing also a lot of trust bridges being built. So when you walk in, you know, and have those conversations about the author or tell me about the sweater or what have you, it builds that trust. And I think that you also have some experiences where.
It wasn't, you didn't have just one time clients where you moved maybe them once and then you worked with them again. Um, one woman in particular, I mean, we moved her from the big house to a smaller house, then to the condo, then to assisted living, and then when she died, we cleared out her stuff. We knew the family really well by the time we got to that.
We had a client who had lost his wife maybe two years before we met him. He was moving at the end of Chicago from the suburbs. He had a girlfriend. We went into his house, and the bedroom was completely blacked out. There was no light in the bedroom at all. All of the wife's medications, everything from her cancer, was still in that room.
And I thought, well, maybe this is, in some crazy way, it's like a sanctuary for him. This is his really, really, really special place. Even though it looks depressing and it's very dark, this is a cave that he needs right now. So we're not going to even talk about it. And when the light, lighting moment came, he said, you know how much weight I've lost?
I've lost 70 pounds. I said, get out of here. He goes, come here. He opens the closet in this dark, dark, dark room. He goes, I want you to take the pants out and tell me what the size is. So 36, he goes, out. 38, out. And we did this for about three hours. We went through every single article of clothing. And he was so proud of, of, that he didn't need these anymore, that these were, were, you know, no longer him.
And you could just, you could just see it, you could see it peeling away that he was letting go of this other life and somehow he had figured out that it didn't mean he didn't love his wife. Because that was what was there. It was how do I leave this, this room where I spent time with this woman I loved and now I have to leave the room.
And if you understand that that's what that is, that's what's going on, then you don't push someone. You don't say today we're doing the pants or I'm just going to clear your closet out because if he lets it go, it's his decision. I think about the correlations between the work that you're talking about and the concept of.
Like when you think about workplace transitions, and I think that when we don't talk about these things and we don't normalize that this is the reality and also that the reality is different for everyone, it's not just straightforward. It's a real estate transaction is not just as easy as one household moving to a new household and the next one coming in.
There's so much emotion so much history. And so much relationship to either the home and the place or to the job and the role, and you mentioned identity earlier, um, and I think it was around the identity to the relationship or to the story. Why is it that we don't see more of you folks doing the work that you've done?
Why do you think that is? Like, why are we missing that boat on not providing that support to each other? People tend, I think, to think of transitions as a transaction. I'm changing jobs. I won't be in this room anymore, I'll be over there. Uh, my bedroom will be this room, not that room. And that's true. And I think you do have to have a certain amount of distance to be able to make a transition.
I don't know if this is just an American thing, but we don't talk about any of the processes that we are all going to go through. We don't talk about death. We don't talk about, uh, I have grandchildren. My children's friends, some of them have a baby and they go back to work in six weeks. And nobody says, wait a minute, that's nuts.
We don't give ourselves the, and we don't ask for it. We don't demand that, that I'm, I, I'm worth this. I, I've just had this experience and it's valid and it's real. I need time to be in it. And if you're moving, especially if you're moving and changing jobs, that's not actually necessarily the time you get rid of stuff.
You might need to hold on to things until you get there. And then you go, I don't really like that painting. Why do I have it? So sometimes, you know, we had clients who would say, Don't do that yet. Take it with you and give it a year. But I don't know why we don't, you know, my mother in law just died and nobody ever talked about the fact that she 96 years old.
What did they think was going to happen? She wasn't sick. We had dinner with her the night before she died. Um, it was a surprise. It shouldn't, it shouldn't be incapacitating and we do not talk, we don't talk about people who are sick. We just don't want to go in that space. And I don't really, I understand it, but I, it's not healthy.
Well, and you had, you had talked about how the clients eventually find their way to being lighter and happier. And I just, I do envision and imagine a place where more of us do talk about death and about sickness and about. Divorce. And because then it does bring, I don't know that it would bring happiness, but it brings lightness and ease just in having had the conversations.
Well, if you were, I mean, divorce is really tricky. Um, that that's just so many layers, you know, depending if you have children or not, because you assume that for many people, that's a, that's moving toward a happy thing, a better thing. But for some people, it's devastating and awful and terrible. And that's, that's real.
I mean, you can't, you can't deny if you're, if you're in pain, you're in pain. What do you wish that more people knew about the nuance of navigating difficult transitions? You've covered it along the way as we've been talking, but is there, is there one or two things that you wish that people knew that if they did, they might be more equipped and, and maybe one other question I'll kind of add in there is you, you were talking about how people feel silly.
Or stupid or what have you. I think a lot of that's because we feel like we're the only one. So that's a lot of questions to ask you kind of together, but, or maybe not a question at all. Well, um, I mean, with the first client, um, who wouldn't let me in to see anything when, when I was able to open the closet and say, this looks like everybody else's closet.
You could feel her, her just go, what? Yeah. Everybody has this. And I think that's true of lots of things. Most people are going to change jobs at some point. Most people are going to move at some point. So, that's, that's just kind of a given. And I guess, with job transitions, I actually, I have not had a big corporate kind of career, you know.
So, that's kind of unfamiliar turf to me. I imagine that there's lots of layers in that as well. You're going to something. You're always like, we, we, we moved from Chicago, we were there for 23 years, and we moved back here about five years ago, eight years ago. And I knew that there were probably five people I'd stay in touch with.
Everybody said, oh, we'll see you, we'll see you, and I said, no, you won't. We'll, you'll, we'll be Christmas card friends. And it's not that I don't like you or care about you or want to know what's going on, but it's impossible to keep that many relationships up when you're not there. So don't feel bad about it.
It's just the way it is. And it's true. I have five friends who I keep in touch with very close, you know, and the others, I love to see them if I see them, but that I don't expect that in myself. And maybe sometimes we, we beat ourselves up. We set ourselves up to feel bad because we have expectations that are not realistic.
And then when we don't meet them, it reinforces our sense that we are inadequate or if we just worked a little harder, did a little more. And forgiveness is really a very powerful tool. And we sometimes forgive other people, but we forget to forgive ourselves. And you gotta give yourself permission for that, like, I did the best I could.
Um, or, or this is really painful and horrible and I don't like it. All of those things are, are okay. It's just part of being a person. I love that you named and normalized the fact that when you leave a place or a thing, it is unlikely that you will stay in touch. Because that is I found that every time that we've moved, but it's, it feels somewhat awkward or I don't know the right word for it.
It feels not okay to say that out loud, but it's the truth. It is the truth. And if you say, I mean, I'm, I'm a, I'm a big truth teller. That's, I, I don't see any reason to say things away if they aren't. Um, and I find that saying the truth is actually extremely liberating. When my mother in law was dying, I was talking to my.
Uh, brother in law who was in Annapolis and he was, didn't know what he was going to do. He said, I don't, should I get in the car? And he said, yeah, I don't know what's going on. I said, what's going on is your mother is dying. That's what's going on. And all you have to do is ask yourself, will I have regrets?
If I do not, and then fill in the blank, get in the car, get there in time, whatever, and then work through that so that you don't have any regrets, because that's really where we'll, that will get in your way. And maybe you'll be here, halfway here, and you will miss her death, but you will have been on the way to being with her.
So your intention is honorable, and you will not say, I can't believe I've never even gotten the car. I think that we could do more of that as people of, are you going to regret this, or feel bad? Then, then step back and say, well, maybe I could do this a different way. We're awfully hard on ourselves when we often don't have all of the information we need.
And so I think about your clients being awfully hard on themselves for all the different reasons. And then not until you and your girls show up, do they realize, Oh, I don't have all the information I need. I don't know that this is, you know, a traumatic response. I don't know that this is something that other people go through.
And I think that's. It's so important for people to hear that, number one, we're too hard on ourselves. And number two, I love what you just said around answer the question, will you regret? And for some, it might be making a decision to leave or making a decision to stay. Having that introspective conversation with yourself is important.
And decisions are very rarely black and white. And every time, any time you move forward, you're moving forward away from something or you're moving sideways or you're doing, if you're looking for the perfect job, the perfect partner, you are going to be disappointed because we all have flaws and insecurities and expectations.
Has every job you've ever had met all of your expectations? Oh, definitely. You didn't know what they were, you don't even know what they are sometimes until you, you're in the middle of it. And you go, Oh, my first summer job, I was, I was a substitute, you know, whatever temp in the William Morris agency, because my mother was an agent.
I mean, it's a dream job. Everybody wants this job. And I realized that I hate being in an office building more than anything. That was a really good, important thing for me to learn about myself. If you, if you're a person who wants to be in an office, who loves all of that, who loves the camaraderie and the, the routine and all that, it's good to know that about yourself.
Because it will help you in making decisions so you don't make, not bad decisions, but you don't make decisions that you have to rethink. That's a wasted time if, if you had the opportunity to think something through and you didn't. Give it the time it needs. Then if you start second guessing yourself, you're just spinning the wheels.
Yeah, well, that goes back to you had mentioned it goes back to giving yourself time in between the big decisions and in between the transitions and there's some probably good thought around giving yourself some space. To reflect on those questions. What, what about the thing that I'm leaving didn't work for me?
What could I change about that going forward? And that's, that's another really helpful tip. As we wrap up, I think the last question I'd love to ask you is what's your definition of leaving well, or what does leaving well mean to you? If the thing that you're leaving or the place, if you've completed whatever that is, you've done a good job, You've now gotten to a point where you really need more, or you need a different environment.
Leaving well, to me, is when the thing you're leaving, you're not leaving because you're leaving voluntarily, it's your decision. And you go towards something with the expectation that you have the skills, and the strength, and the, the goals, all of that is, is, is set. Nothing works the way you want it to or you think it's going to, but you have the skills and the strength and all the, you have every, all the tools in your toolbox that you need to handle the next one.
Regret is a really terrible, terrible emotion. And if you leave something and you left something unfinished, that can nag at you. If there's something you want to say to somebody, say it. If you love them, tell them you love them. If, you know, you got a bug to pick, pick it. Say it. You know, live truthfully.
Just get rid of all the stuff that we coat ourselves with, that are, you think are helpful, but they aren't. They're, they're layers that we wear and it's, it can be a little scary to take the coat off. And if you've made a mistake, you know, if it was wrong, sometimes you make a decision, it's a, it's the wrong decision and you have to go back and you have to do something else.
That's okay too. Don't bang your head against the wall. It's just not going to do any good for anybody. I love that. Amy, thank you so much for sharing about your story and some stories of your clients. Thank you. To learn more about leaving well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace, visit naomihattaway.com. It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system. We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide, to shift culture, and to create transformation. Until next time, I'm your host Naomi Hattaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a navigation guide for workplace transitions.