Checkpoints

Yay or nay?

So. What I’ve established without a doubt so far is that I’m very good at stressing myself out.

When I stepped back from my full-time first career, I gave myself a very arbitrary 1.5 years to ‘dick around’ so to speak. The first 8 months was to go through the training program and the latter 8 months to try working in the field. And I protected the hell out of this exploratory period.

But as the months flew by I grew more and more antsy. Yes I did try a bunch of things but the path forward was nowhere near as clear as I hoped it would be. I beat myself up over many things, like not being as ‘brave’ or ‘passionate’ as my classmates to go all out, for still holding onto to first career for a lot of practical reasons.

Even though I had absolutely no regrets of making this detour, I still felt annoyed with myself. That wtf why can I not figure out my shit already? That and the fact that I was steadily eating into my savings to keep going made be feel even more uncertain.

As this extremely arbitrary deadline crept closer, I kinda panicked, scattering random job applications back in my first career while it was winter season (and thus not much going on in horticulture gigs).

Setting this checkpoint in the first place was so I could have a formal time to reassess what I’ve done so far and to stave off procrastination. It was also a way of tricking my brain to make this whole side step feel easier to go along with. It had an endpoint.

But on the flip side, I’m not sure if it is such a good idea, since it made the last couple of months much harder to feel ‘present’.

I guess it really depends on your personality whether this works or not for your own journey.

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-S

Note: if it’s not already apparent, the time of my writing is delayed from the experience itself. To pin this post to the approximate date, this would be late 2022, early 2023.

Image credit: Pixabay - Barbara Dondrup