Taking A Step Back to Find My Way Forward
On searching for purpose and happiness in a hectic world.
When I was younger I couldn't wait to be an adult. Like most teenagers, I railed against the unfairness of my life and dreamed of the near future when I would have unlimited freedom and success and do everything better than my parents. I imagined life after college as a series of progressive steps that built on top of one another in a logical, linear fashion eventually leading to the top that would be marked by unending happiness. This was winning. Finding a good, fulfilling career that left me free from monetary concerns, partnered with an equally successful and loving man. This was about as far as I saw into the future. And I had no doubt that if I could just get out of my hometown, all of these things would come to pass.
For all of our youth, this is more or less the picture that we are painted. You go to college to get a job, you buy a house, etc. Life progresses in continuously upward steps. But the minute you’re thrust out of the warm comforting womb of college into the real world, it becomes quite apparent that this isn’t necessarily true. It certainly wasn’t for me. Life post-college was filled with many stops and starts. And yet, there was forward motion. I got one job and then another, each one slightly better with slightly better pay. And this continued for a few years. None of the jobs had anything to do with what I’d studied in college or my lifelong goals. They were just jobs, ways to survive in New York City while I continued to figure it out. It was always drilled into me that I should just get any job and continued looking for the right one, but that I’d be a better candidate if I was employed.
There were times when I felt like I was being propelled forward with no control over my trajectory, just casting wildly about taking whatever happened into my path. And there were times that I felt completely stuck and stagnant. I dreamed about quitting each of the terrible jobs again and again, but the reality of maintaining my life, paying my rent, feeding my cat (and myself) prevented me from making such a rash decision for years.
Finally, I hit a breaking point. I was burned out on the city and of trying to make it work at jobs that I hated. I thought maybe a change of scenery might help. Lower cost of living might give me the opportunity to try out a career that was more in line with my passions and morals. I moved to Denver and threw myself into freelance writing. There were many good things about this, I had more time to breathe and focus on my health and sleep for goodness sake. But it was lonely, especially being away from my network in New York. And working from home I didn’t have much opportunity to meet other people. And while I did better than I expected right out of the gate as a freelance writer, money was still tight. Shockingly, running away from the problem didn’t change anything.
I took advantage of my freedom to travel a bit, and during this time, I heard that I’d been accepted to a grad program I’d applied to in England on a bit of a whim. I’d thought a lot about grad school but didn’t really dedicate enough time to researching different programs. I knew I wanted to study abroad and I knew the general topic I wanted to study–something in politics that would allow me to reorient my career towards international development and conflict resolution. So in a last-ditch effort to continue moving forward, I accepted my place at the university in England and packed my bags.
It was a year of a lot of ups and downs, and it soon became apparent that I could have benefitted from applying to more programs and doing more thorough research. But it gave me a purpose for a year, and that was immensely helpful. School has always been a grounding force in my life, and I was convinced that getting my master’s degree would help me get a better job, one that I valued and made me feel like I was contributing to the world in a positive way.
It soon became apparent, that this job wasn’t going to be as easy to find as I had hoped. Almost a year after graduation and hundreds of job applications later, it still hasn’t materialized. I was very frustrated and demoralized by the job search for quite a few months, especially because I wasn’t even sure where I wanted to live. Staying in Europe was kind of the goal, but I couldn’t stay there indefinitely without a work visa. I had told myself that I was done with New York, despite part of me yearning to return.
After a short stint in London, I returned to the Midwest, where I am from, seeing no other option. This was when the reality of everything really hit me. It felt like a huge step backward, and one that I never thought I’d have to take. My life was supposed to continuously move forward right? Everyone else’s was. And here I was, with my newly minted degree and a whole boatload of new debt, back in Wisconsin with no plan of what to do next. Even the jobs I applied to back home didn’t seem to want me. It was a low point.
And worst of all, it slowly started to dawn on me, that part of my struggle to find work in the field I really wanted to be in was hindered by my early career choices. I started setting up loads of informational chats with people in my network in the industry, to get a sense of what I was doing wrong and how I could fix it. And the overwhelming feedback I got was that most of the people around my age who were doing the work I wanted to be doing had slowly worked their way up, mostly starting with unpaid internships in the field that led to other internships and eventually jobs. The degree I got was sort of helpful, but was nothing compared to real, on the ground experience. Experience I could only get by really and truly starting over. All of the advice I’d been listening to in my early career was just patently wrong. I had started myself on a forward path that I didn’t want to be on, and getting on a new path really did mean starting over in many ways.
Unable to continue living in Wisconsin and unwilling to accept another job outside of my field, I was unsure what how to move forward and finally realized that I needed to accept this pause. Life doesn’t have to be continuously moving forward. It is ok to take some time to figure out the next step and make sure it is the right one. I decided that figuring it out in New York would make me happier, so I got on a plane and came back. I took a restaurant job to pay the bills and moved into a sublet with 4 other roommates. It feels, in many ways, like the year I graduated from undergrad. I feel lost and unsure of what’s coming next, but I am making it work and taking time to be truly intentional about the trajectory of my life. I still don’t have it all figured out and I don’t know where I’ll be in a year from now, but I am coming to accept that just barreling forward to feel like life is progressing in the “right” way isn’t the way to find happiness. Sometimes you need to take a step back and really look at where you are and what you want, to find the right way forward.
