stripethree

This post inspired by a series of recent events ranging from a visit home, attending a friend’s wedding and seeing people I went to elementary school with, random work happenings including another self assessment, as well as a similar entry from a Suspect friend of mine.

What is next?

Upon reading Maribeth’s thoughts, a scene from Fight Club came to mind, no doubt because I happened to catch some of it on TV the previous week. Brad Pitt’s character talks about his relationship with his father and how his life basically took a set direction. Go to college. Ok, now what? Get a job. Ok, now what? Get married. Ok, now what? And so forth and so on. Then I turned around and found myself at an “Ok, now what?” point myself with no one to turn around and ask. I’ll admit, while I work hard, I’ve been pretty lucky and had good guidance on things to this point. Go back to high school, the wonderous magnet program and falling backwards into Computer Science as a field. Maryland was a natural choice, mom went there, I had friends going, the Comp Sci program was great (although hellish). End up at an intership with Booz Allen through a chance reply to a bulletin I got emailed through the career center arm of CMPS. Graduate Maryland, job is waiting based on the internship experience at the same company. Still have an itch for school for some reason and seeing coworkers experience would lead me to want to do it sooner rather than later. JHU has a good program, no worries about the GRE or a thesis and I was accepted. Seemed like a logical thing to do and I don’t say that to undermine any motivation I had, it was there, even though the program itself did a bang up job of trying to stifle it. I even fell backwards into moving out of Maryland, something I’d always wanted to do, just never felt I had a chance or real reason to other than for the sake of it. So, I’m out of Maryland, done with grad school, doing well at my job with a highly respected company and somewhere on my way to one of those ‘career’ things, and that’s where it gets murky.

I think it started to hit when I had to fill in some career goals for my annual self-assessment. Previously, I wanted to get promoted (did so last year), finish my grad school degree, and some other miscellaneous self-improvement items I managed to address. This year, I found myself drawing a blank. A big blank. I found myself staring at that ‘career’ word thinking, “I’m not even 25, is this for real?” My ‘career’ is just learning how to walk and I doubt its ready to start planning its adolescence. Then there’s the trip home. Questions about how long I might stay in Tucson that I did not have answers to. Questions about whether I might come back to Maryland sometime or where else I might go, again, which I had no answers to. Granted the questions were natural, but for someone who tends to always have plans, not having any answers was slightly disconcerting. I was home to attend the wedding of a friend of mine, Joanna, who I have known since second grade. There’s at least two more to attend this year and probably more to come before the end of the decade. That as a next step for me is out of the question now, but it makes you think. It makes you wonder. Then I read Maribeth’s thoughts and I had to breathe some relief in the knowledge that I’m not alone. I also had to write her back and tell her she wasn’t alone.

A big part of me wants to just kind of go with the flow and see what happens in many respects of life. The problem I have with that is two fold. One, that’s pretty much what I have been doing and while it’s done me well, this is pretty much where it ends. There is no natural, logical next step, I have to make this shit up now. Second, I don’t want to get stuck, caught in the Office Space of life and waking up one morning and realize things I should have done years ago when I had the chance. The problem with the alternative of going with the flow is, well, the ‘now what’? I know some of the things I don’t want to do but that doesn’t narrow the field nearly enough. Do I want to stick around this area for a while or do I want to jump around to other parts of the country while I can? Does it go beyond that? While I’m not unhappy by any means, I still feel that uneasiness of searching for what on the green earth is going to make and keep me happy in the long term. In the long term… now I do sound like a consultant. I’ve learned, well, been forced to learn, that making precious plans should be taken lighter than I take them, since they have a tendency to crumble beyond my control. There’s always been some sort of plan, some goals to reach, things to strive for, but now I sit with a blank piece of paper where they used to sit and I have no idea what to fill it with.

It might be the best thing to ever happen to me, it might not. It certainly is one of the most intimidating.