Thoughts on the present and past

In the past couple of weeks, I have been forced to make some very hard decisions about my life and its direction. Honestly, its scary. I have said this privately to some friends, but once you leave college you don't quite realize that all bets are off. In making these decisions, for the first time I had no prescribed path. Yes, in college you had some degree of choice (major, courses, activities, etc.) but on the whole, you knew that you were on the right path there. Now, ever since I graduated, I have been finding it harder to make major decisions because this is my first time without that prescribed overall path.. Post college, you can truly do whatever you want, whenever you want. Making these kinds of decisions is hard because there is no 100% certainty in any decision, so there will always be lingering doubts, no matter what side you take. Especially when you have no idea what it is exactly that you want to do. Having to take this personal responsibility for everything definitely adds gravity to the decision.

On that note, I think I am also a little bit gun shy about shaking things up in my life right now. My first nine months in NYC were not what I would call successful, which is partially what landed me at this point in the first place. Towards the end of school last year, I think I suffered from a bit of hubris, and now I am paying for it. I made some amazingly stupid decisions, and only now am at the point where I can start to turn things around and achieve a fresh start. I spent a long time up here very unhappy, and it took me a while to reach the point where I realized I had to make changes. Looking back, its amazing how far I had fallen. I had set the goal of an engaging job in an exciting new place, and latched onto it. I held it as my unifying driving factor, ignoring changing circumstances in my life and the effect they might have on the viability of that goal. Then, once I had achieved it, I realized that in fact it was something that wasn’t what I wanted. By putting blinders on, I closed myself off to other opportunities. I was so tuned in to opening myself up to exciting new experiences, that I missed out on many that were closer to home. Ironic that I wound up in New York.

And then, once I reached this bright new world that I assumed I would take by storm (conveniently forgetting the years of work it took to get where I was at school), I realized that everything wasn't quite so easy as I had made it out to be. This quote is from an online novel I read, discussing the characters’ first experiences at college (though I feel like it applies to people in my situation just as well):

“We were so excited to be on our own. Away from the lives we knew, we could finally see who we were without the preconceived notions and expectations that had always been there because of family and friends and all the other people who'd shaped us growing up.”

What I realized is, what happens when you get to that point, see who you are without those preconceived notions, and you don’t like what is left? That is a question I have had to answer, and it is not a fun thing to do. I was in an environment where I no longer had friends and family looking at me through rose-colored glasses, ignoring my flaws. All day, every day, I was now in an environment where the only reflection I saw was through the harsh glare of how strangers saw me. It magnified my personality “quirks”, and forced me to truly confront them for the first time. And it was sink or swim. I could either run away mentally and refuse to admit that I had to start changing myself, or I could take this feedback that I was getting and observing, and do something with it. The combination of having to change the flaws within myself, as well as stopping the behaviours I had picked up along the way that led to my dislike of who I had become has proven to be very hard to handle. And for a long time I just shut down. Over the course of the last couple months I have started to come out of it though, a process greatly aided by the last couple weeks. Now, all I can hope for is the ability to correct as many of those mistakes as I can, leave the regret behind me, and learn from the personal hell that I have subjected myself to.

Let's Try Again

Looking back over the last 16 or so posts, I realize this has rambled back and forth between stagnancy and proliferation, with no real common line of subjects. I have deleted about half of those, and saved the rest, with the hope of a fresh start in this space. I am going to start this up again to provide myself a place to chronicle my thoughts. Partly because i find myself constantly reading and finding information that I want to retain, but short of taking notes, have no way to organize it all, this will be that place. Also, reading over the posts I did not delete, I am upset I did not keep it up back then. It was worthwhile to read the short ones I have left, if I had done full write-ups on those trips, they would have been absolutely priceless. This is pretty much going to be the place I keep my internal life organized, and a place where I can look back and chart my progress. Towards what I am progressing, I don’t rightly know. I know that I am, and always will be, on the path though. I will let this flow where it will, in the meantime developing my voice, my own processes. I have learned a lot and matured a lot these past few months, but I don’t want to lose those lessons. I know now how easy it is to forget past lessons while caught up in life’s current successes. Let this also stand as my way of reining myself in, constantly reminding myself that the journey is never over, and to never be satisfied with what I have accomplished (more on all that later though).

Lately I have read a lot about how, with the information and content driven business model cropping up everywhere today, where added value is the buzzword, people are beginning to manage themselves as a brand. In the past, that was a much more ethereal concept. Your personal brand was how people thought of you, the network you build, the connections you make in your day to day life. Now, with the proliferation of Web 2.0 and social networking, personal branding has taken on a whole new level of involvement. Through the multitude of options (Twittr, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, et al) each person has the ability to present themselves exactly how they wish, and to network with anyone the world over in the process. Never before was such unfettered access to the haves given to the have nots. For example, through Twittr and blogs, anyone can now interact with Senior level members of Fortune 500 companies. This space, then, is also to serve as my way of keeping all of that together. It will help me keep my online life organized and easy to track. Also, now your resume is not the only thing representing you to prospective employers. I have already seen job postings that specifically ask you to not submit a resume. Rather, they want to see what is in your RSS reader, what you write in your blog, the content you contribute and are capable of creating.

The main purpose of this is internal for me, in that I will use it to track where I have been and what I was thinking. If people enjoy what I write here and share it with others, or want to use it to keep in touch with me, that is wonderful. On the flip side, if everyone who comes across this thinks it is ridiculous and no one ever reads it, I will be just as happy. I make this public as an extra motivation to stay involved with it.