There are so many good ideas out there about life and work. Some ideas that I nodded along with and I'd say I agreed with to varying extents throughout my life included:
Money can't buy happiness.
Everyone has a gift. Find yours and use it.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.
Work hard at work worth doing.
Do one thing every day that scares you.
And mostly, something like: If you find something you love to do and you work really hard at it, good things will happen.
And something like: It's better to work in a job that you enjoy - that is fulfilling to you - than to work in one that does not resonate with you but pays better. (Back to that "money can't buy happiness" thing.)
That's all well and good, right? But like so many things I've been noticing in my life over the past year or so, there's a huge gap between my intellectual understanding of all of these ideas and actually feeling and believing these sorts of sentiments.
It's easier to do the safe thing. And the safe thing is probably, maybe, the less fulfilling thing. For me, the safe thing for the past 20 years or so has been to achieve. To plot a course and follow it relentlessly, with zero tolerance for exceptions or excuses and zero flexibility. It served me well. I jumped through the hoops. I got the As and the practicum placements and internship and postdoc.
Yet...
I kept finding myself a triangle trying to squeeze through a circle. Trying to cut myself so I'd fit. Or
letting other people look at my insides and click their tongues and swallowing their assessments whole.
I could work in the schools. I could do good work. But I could never see myself there in the long run. I have friends and colleagues who are phenomenal school psychs who can thrive and excel in the schools and that is wonderful. But I just didn't see myself there.
I could do the postdoc thing too. I could run statistical analyses and write manuscripts, create Gantt charts and coordinate projects and write screenplays. But I had to laugh because I always* said that research was not really my thing, and wasn't where I thought I'd end up. I gave it a try because maybe I was dismissing it out of hand, and I'm glad that I did it. But I just didn't see myself there.
So on a whim? Or maybe not a whim - maybe it was after lots of work and thought and meditation? I decided to see what would happen if I did the scary thing. The one I really wanted. The thing where I work in private practice and my income is unstable and my hours are unstable and I don't always know what I'm doing and I'm learning and helping and growing every day. And I did. And it's terrifying. And incredible.
It's easier to do the safe thing, but we can do hard things. It's messy. It's scary. It's maybe not the right time? But is there ever a right time to do a big, scary thing like, say, doing what you actually want to do with your life instead of what you think other people want you to do or need you to do?
I don't have it all figured out or anything. I just have this feeling that it's the right move. It's so difficult and scary that I can't even adequately describe it, but at the same time as I feel terror and panic about the unknown with all of this, I feel such a real sense of peace about the whole thing. I can feel myself light up just talking about what I'm doing now. I am patient and compassionate with myself in this role. There is so much right and good. And I can see myself here. And I can actually be here.
*except during grad school interviews, when everyone says they want to be an academic for life, obviously
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