Wow.
It’s October and 2020 is coming to an end soon. Autumn is here, the leaves have changed colours and I get cold just looking out the window.
Last year around this time my life was so different, it was one of the most unhappy times of my life. I have never been through grief like this past year and a half, but now I feel grateful to have had the opportunity to truly re-evaluate my life and make choices based on what I like and who I am, in stead of continuing to simply struggle through life surviving day to day and not really taking to time to figure out who I am and how I feel.
Today, I am happier than I can ever remember being. Maybe “happy” is the wrong word, because it doesn’t really cover it. I am grateful. I am grateful that I am alive. I am grateful that I am where I am. I am grateful for the people I have had in my life, both the good and the bad, and grateful for the people who are still in my life. I am grateful for all the little, good things that happen every day.
Sure, there’s a lot of bad stuff in life, but I got through so many things that I now know myself better than I ever did before and I accept all that I am – even though it is not at all who I wanted to be.
Accepting myself was not easy, especially because it came with a huge consequence that freaks me out like nothing ever did before. I realised I had to completely change my life. I have in this last month made the single most terrifying life-altering decision of my entire life – and I still have no idea if I’ll succeed or not. I just know this is who I am and that to honour that, I have to at least give it a go.
I’ve done many silly things in my life, going after a life that makes me happy has to be one of the better reasons to do something silly.
So, I applied and well, I might have gotten in. Everything has been “unofficially” approved so far. I still have to get it all official, but I am pretty sure everything will work out now. The worst has passed.
In January I will start going to school again. I’m going to leave behind my years of hard work at university and put my master’s degree behind me and instead I’ll start going to vocational school. First day is January 11th next year.
I will be even more broke than I ever was, but for the first 20 weeks I’ll be getting a small government stipend which will be enough for all my basic needs as long as I stay living with my mother. I am so grateful to even get this opportunity, so I’ll find a way to make everything work out. I have student loans from university, and I’ll be paying those off the next 15 years at least, which is one of the reasons starting over is so very terrifying. It feels like all I got from fighting my way through university and graduate with a masters in Japanese studies is debt. I was never able to work because of it, not even for a single day.
I am literally leaving behind all I that know and starting something entirely new and I have no idea if I’ll be able to make it or fail in the most spectacular way. I have to try though. Even though I just prefer things being the same, I think I’d rather be happy every day instead of unhappy, and if everything had stayed the same, I would have continued to be unhappy. Of course, my overactive brain isn’t making it easy.
Now that my brain no longer needs to focus all its attention on how to find a way out of the epic failure that is the course of my life, it does the only thing it knows how to do… because I haven’t had the time or the energy to re-program its function yet, it does what it always does when it has no particular purpose to fulfil.
My brain will start to actively compile a list in my head of all the reasons everything is going to go horribly wrong. It basically says all the things everyone else told me while I was growing up, because it’s not enough for me to allow other people to talk bad about me, apparently I allow my brain to do it too… It even has the added bonus that no matter where I go, that voice in my head follows, constantly talking, like an overly obnoxious stalker.
I’m worried I’ll fail, yes, because if I fail then… well, it would suck. I’m worried I won’t like it, because that’ll be kind of frustrating too. I should know myself well enough by now to make important life-altering decisions on a whim and follow through. Or, at least be able to make them after not making any decisions about my life for years… or… well, actually, maybe it’s okay to have doubts. Life-altering decisions are, after all, life-altering. It’d be rather strange if it wasn’t a big deal.
Oh, yes, I’ll just make this life-altering decision, have some tea and get started – no biggie. Just an average Thursday for me.
Well, that’ll never be an average Thursday that’s for sure.
It’s a decision of epic proportions and those decisions usually have me worrying about it months or years after it happened and by then, I probably still won’t know if I should have made the choice I did or not.
It’s somehow different this time, though. Yes, it was horrible when I had to make the decision, but then, day by day, I feel more comfortable with my choice. It feels like me. Of course, this is the reason I made this choice in the first place. It’s me. That’s all there is to it.
So, next year will be busy for me – I hope.
I have long been annoyed with the look of my blog, which is not surprising because I designed it all when I was awfully depressed and grieving, so it has long since felt like it wasn’t suited for who I am now.
I made some changes already, as you may have noticed, and I even designed a sort of logo for myself. I will be continuing to make changes, for example my tagging and category systems have long been outdated and I’ll change it all over the next couple of months. My plan is that by January my blog will have a great, long term design that and that I won’t have to work too much on the technical stuff, but instead I get to focus my soon limited time on writing – the reason I started this blog in the first place.
I hope you’ll like the changes coming!
Also, when I get my official acceptance I’ll tell you all about what I’ll actually be doing from now on and of course, once I get in, I’ll tell you about how it all goes. The most scary thing now is that I’ll have to interact with people and be social out in the real world again and really, one of the most scary things (if not the scariest, right?) is people.
We’ll have to see how it goes. Let me know if you have any suggestions for my blog and most importantly, if you have had to make a life-altering decision yourself. How did that go? Or, are you about to make one soon just like me?
Everyone stay safe out there!
