Eye-Opening Weekend

Nothing particularly amazing happened over this past holiday weekend - I went home, finally got to celebrate Mother's Day with my mom, witnessed a very quiet house without our dog Ginger and consoled a mourning Sam, spent time with friends and family, and just tried to soak up as much Austin as I could before I had to leave. I love Austin.

However, this time in Austin did make me wake up to the fact that I will need to start making some important decisions about my future and where I want life to take me (not that you have much of a say in where life takes you sometimes...I'm just saying).

I have almost been in the real world for one year and what they say is true: it's hard. I've spent time away from my family for the first time, I'm working at my first full-time job, and I'm in a new city for the first time in my life. I didn't expect it to be easy but I didn't know what to expect as far as what would be hard and how I would deal with it. Throughout the process, I've obviously started learning some things about myself:

1) I do want to spend some time away from my family. As much as I love them and I'm not saying that I can't wait to be away from them, I feel like it's a good thing to not be so accessible to them and them to me. Dallas is proving to be not far enough as it's still very easy for them to say, "oh just come home for the weekend." Eight hours of driving later, I have spent the weekend away from doing things with the new people that I have met here in Dallas, away from getting things done at my apartment, and wondering when my family will make the trek to see me instead. They've even joked that if I was somewhere more desirable they would come visit me, which really doesn't make me feel all that good.

This brings us to our second point...

2) My first job decision was very planned - where I wanted to be and what I wanted to be doing. The job part of that was not wanting some sort of hybrid planning position where I wouldn't get to be a pure planner. I accomplished this mission. The other part of that was the city. I knew I didn't want to be too far away from my family because I wasn't sure how I would handle it. That may sound defeatist but I was trying to be realistic and do what made sense for me. The urge to go far far away had not really struck me and even though some cities seemed "cool" I didn't know how living there would actually be. Both of those pieces landed me in a great job that gave me wonderful introductory learning as a planner in a city that was not too far away from home. Sounds pretty regular now.

As I near my year mark at my job, the end of my lease at my apartment, and the completion of one year out in the real world, I'm already getting the itch to look at my options.

For one, my next job choice will be based on the job and a city that I want to live in. And I will want to live in this city because of its personality, not due to the proximity to my family. Let's face it, Dallas doesn't inspire me. I know that any city I live in will have to hold its weight against Austin and I consider that to be a tall order. How can I be inspiring at work if my surroundings don't inspire me to interact with it more? And part of me knows that this is not entirely Dallas' fault...I know that I could have made more of an effort to do things and I'm sure that part of me just didn't want to like Dallas in the first place. I was certainly told by many that Dallas sucked and even though in the beginning I tried not to pay attention to that, I fed into that sentiment quickly.

Another thing is, I am starting to feel that call to move somewhere completely different. Part of me just wants to plunge into the deep end to just do it. A lot of it would be the experience, but part of me knows that I need to make a more measured decision than that. It's still obviously about the job opportunities I can find, but I just need the city to be a part of it. If I'm going to be away from all of my family and friends, then I need something else to hold on to.

3) I do love Austin. That's not going to change because it's my hometown, I grew up there, plus I went to college there and had a wide range of experiences as well as meeting some of the greatest people I know. No one can take that away from me.

I've always thought that I would go away for a while and then circle back around to be closer to my family. I feel like someday I will move back to Austin. But how do I know that Austin is the best place for me? How do I know that I won't love some other place equally or for different kinds of reasons that would make me want to settle there, start a family, or pursue other career options?

I guess it's as grandiose as saying there's a whole wide world out there that I want to see and experience, but sometimes I'm afraid. I don't want to feel like I'll fail...I guess that brings me to my next point.

4) I feel like I have experienced failure here...and I feel like that is a really good thing for me personally. I know that sounds strange. And they're not big failures by any means. It's also not that I don't think I've experienced little failures like this before. But I guess I feel that it's different now in that this time the failures are really only getting dealt with by me. Do I ask my friends, coworkers, and family for advice? Of course. But I'm starting to realize that the decisions made on these things are more than ever mine and mine alone. I take other's opinions and weigh them carefully, but my decisions have either made me succeed or have made me stumble a bit. It's fairly cliche to say that this has made me a stronger person, but I will say that and add to it that I am understanding how I function a little better. I still think I have a lot to learn about myself, actually I don't think the learning will ever stop, but I'm so glad that it's happening.

These failures are harder to deal with for me in that they aren't just a poor grade or a conflict with a classmate that I really never had to resolve because the project was over. The real world makes everything interconnected and makes those little failures matter a lot more. If I have a hard day at work, it affects my home life. If things seem unorganized and frazzled at home, that translates to my job. It's no longer the division of school and summer, or even of school and the real world. Now it's just continuous - the real world and nothing comes after that. There is no definite timeline or boundaries. It just is what it is.

So I've learned that these failures, and being scared, and crying, and having to push myself in new ways to master things that I already thought I had mastered are all just ways of getting to know myself better and clearly defining the person that I am and who I want to be.

5) Real life stinks sometimes. ;) Why is it challenging me so and why do I have to fail in order to learn? And the answer that keeps coming back to me from everyone is...

If it wasn't hard it wouldn't be worth it.

I feel late in developing this, my full person, but I'm glad that I'm getting here, even if I have to go through an obstacle course like this.


There are many many more things that I have learned about myself through this experience but I want to keep it simple.

There's a lot to think about and some decisions need to be made about my future. I'm kind of looking forward to the challenge.