Things are winding down here… I’m moving into a new and very different house in the next 3 weeks. While school remains the same, I recently switched positions at work, and in a few months I will also leave the country for a whole semester. Needless to say, a lot is changing.
But I’m also at one of those points where I can’t really see what lies beyond the next year or so. I’m questioning my priorities as they relate to school, careers, and relationships.
I can’t tell if I want to have a tech career, and if I do, do I want to work for a big company? A startup? Freelance? Also, a very big part of me knows that I get more enjoyment out of my music. Josiah (our guitarist/lyricist) has spent the last few months making big steps towards doing music full-time. I admire his resolve towards making that happen, and I really want to do the same – but I’m not at a point where I can do it yet. I know that I can keep making steps in that direction, but that comes with the opportunity cost of other things that are important to me.
Once or twice a year, I come back to the point where I blog about “doing too much” – spreading myself too thin to the point where I’m not able to really specialize in anything. I always had the feeling that as I got to higher levels of education, or that as I matured, these things would sort themselves out and I’d discover my true “calling.” That may still turn out to be true, but I’m starting to consider the possibility that it’s not a symptom of me being young and restless, but rather a distinctive part of who I am. Maybe my appreciation and understanding of technology, arts and humanities is supposed to be too wide to really concentrate on one area and forget about the rest. If so, I really don’t know how that should translate into the way I live my life, but I think that it’s something that bears more investigation.
I know that some of this stuff can take a lifetime to really figure out, and that some of my questions will never be answered. But I do feel a mild anxiety about choosing a path while I still have a lot of freedom to move around. I don’t have the need to completely support myself with a job yet, and I don’t have a family to care for. The next few years will be the most opportune time to drop everything and try my hand at something else: to live in Spain, to be a full-time musician, to be a Peace Corps Volunteer, to be a freelance web designer/developer.
Ultimately, I have a gut feeling that everything will turn out well, and that I’m just working myself up over it because I can never accept uncertainty until I have a full contingency plan laid out. I’ll be off to a good start once I have that CIS degree, and I won’t let myself assume the big financial or familial responsibilities until I’ve found the things that resonate best with my personality.
OK, enough. I think I’m gonna go drink a steaming cup of Stop Worrying And Just Enjoy Life, Dammit! now.