Kim Fairley, MD
This book is a message of hope for people who feel like giving up. These pages contain real encouragement for anyone who feels like a loser in the most important game of all, the game of life. Are you free falling? Have you have jumped out of the plane and discovered to your horror that you have a defective parachute? Have you looked in the mirror and found yourself startled by the reflection of a failure staring back at you?
I have good news. Failure is a great place to start over from!
Would you like to get to know the Person who wrote the rules to the game of life? This guide is called, Free Falling Into the Right Hands because when we land in the right hands, the hands of our loving Creator, we find the true source of the happiness we were seeking when we took that daring leap out of the plane.
Don’t give up on yourself. It’s never too late. You are not too far gone. No matter who you are, no matter what you have done, the door to your real home is standing wide open, and Someone is waiting for you to come home.
This book is available for purchase on line at www.authorhouse.com, www.amazon.com, and www.barnesandnoble.com.
Kim Fairley is a forty-year-old family doctor, divorced and remarried, mother of two teenaged sons.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Colorado in Boulder, with a BA in distributed studies--Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology; Chemistry; and Sociology--Kim went on to medical school, receiving her MD degree from University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver.
Kim was unfamiliar with the concept of personal failure until a midlife crisis ended in divorce and a terrifying free fall from her former identity. Lucky for her, she landed in the right hands, the hands of God, who generously gave her everything she needed to start over.
My name is Kim, and I am a failure...
I got divorced...
I felt terrible about it, because I was the one who left. Not only that, but I left because I wanted to get involved with another man, a guy who kept telling me how beautiful and neglected I was.
Things with him turned sour quickly.
I tried reconciling with my husband, but spending more time with him convinced me there was no way I could make it work. Every time we did something together, I felt like I was going scuba diving without an oxygen tank. I felt like I should be taking in the scenery, discovering and appreciating the flora and fauna. But all I could think about was how badly I needed to breathe. And before I knew it I was on the surface again, without him, sucking in air.
I couldn’t find any real justification for leaving him. He never cheated on me. He never beat me. He never called me names. If he had done something concrete like that, then I could have left as the good guy, the victim who never did anything wrong. If he had done anything like that, I would not have felt like such a failure. I could have called him the failure instead.
Not that he never hurt me. It’s just that there were no obvious marks or universal violations of contract I could dig up and show as proof I had to leave. Without any clear proof, even I was pretty much convinced I was basically just a selfish philanderer.
I felt like an escaped convict. The law was clear. For true justice I had to do my time. I was legally and morally bound to work it out with the one I promised to love, no matter how unhappy I was. But I simply could not make myself do it. I kept saying to myself, “Just one more week and I’ll go back.” But I never went back.
Like a criminal on the run, I felt removed from society, especially church society. Everyone knew my crime. Everyone (mainly I) knew the life sentence I had skipped out on: “I promise to love him forever.”
I met another guy--a musician from Nashville. We had this great conversation after a concert and began keeping in touch by phone. We started out as friends, good friends who could really talk to each other about anything. But somehow things got tangled up into a romance neither of us even wanted!
That relationship didn’t work out, either.
I felt like I was in the center of a tornado. My identity was whirling around me in fragmented pieces I no longer recognized. I did not know what to think. I did not know what to believe. I no longer knew what was right or wrong. I wandered around in a daze, feeling lost, my mind in overdrive but my thoughts leading nowhere.
Who could I call? Who could I tell? No one!
One day the song, “Free Falling,” (by Tom Petty) wafted to my ears from the stereo in my living room. It struck a chord. I’m finally free, I thought to myself as the words ripped through my soul: free-falling!
That was it! The elusive “freedom” I had tried to grab for myself was nothingness. The air I had struggled so hard to get to and breathe would not sustain my life after all.
I was free falling. I was nobody. I was nothing.
I felt a surge of adrenaline rush through my body, the “fight-or-flight” sensation you feel when something jumps out and grabs you unexpectedly. I had a total panic attack. I knew I had ruined my entire life. I was a criminal. I was an insatiable nymphomaniac. Who was this person I had become?
Here I was, a physician, a writer, a teacher in my church, good-looking and in shape—a success in most peoples’ eyes. But in my own eyes I was a failure. I failed in my marriage. I failed as a mother by inflicting the pain of our separation on my kids. My first new relationship failed. My second new relationship failed.
I might have been able to handle all that if, in exchange for all the pain of failure in those areas, I could honestly say I was now happy. But I was not happy. I was having panic attacks. I felt lost instead of found.
The whole concept of divorce was devastating to my personal code, my personal system of how to live life with a clean conscience. So on top of everything else, having broken the rules of my own moral paradigm I was now a failure as a good person. I had three choices: stop living altogether, pretend things were just fine under the old paradigm, or find a new paradigm. The question was, if I found a new paradigm, would it be something I could really believe in or just some lame attempt to justify my own life and the choices I made?
Some of my friends were shocked and disappointed by my divorce. Others, especially friends who had lived through more dramatic times of failure and rebellion, practically laughed when I shared my feelings of guilt and shame.
Is there some concrete deed or behavior that by universal standard is deserving of the feelings I felt? No. The fact is, I was a failure in my own eyes, and that was what hurt.
Have you experienced the terrifying feeling of free falling, plummeting downward, out of control in a nightmare of personal failure? Have you ever been utterly disappointed with yourself? Even shocked yourself with your wrong choices? Have you ever looked in the mirror and found yourself frightened by the unfamiliar reflection staring back at you?
I have.
This book is not for people who have been deemed failures by society or the church or their parents or any other institution. It is not for people who have let others down. It is for people who have let themselves down. Have you failed according to your own ideas about what it means to be successful as a good human being? Do your find it almost impossible to forgive yourself?
I have good news. Failure is a great place to start over from!
