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I graduated college with a degree in inorganic chemistry. As a kid, I had dreams of being a scientist, and all things considered, I was well on my way there. My mom expected it. This was the path.
However, now, I work in tech sales, which is vastly different from being a scientist. Not to mention, I haven’t used my chemistry degree in 10 years.
So what happened?
If you are like me, you probably had a path for your life laid out. There were things you thought you’d achieve by now or a certain title/job you thought you would have by now. But for one reason or another, you took a different path.
It could’ve been that you didn’t get the chance to pursue your goal, or you couldn’t break into an industry you wanted. It could also be you got the thing you thought you wanted and realized that it doesn’t feel like you thought it would, so now you are left wondering what’s next.
Is your life different from what you thought it would be? If you answered yes to that question, here are three things that have helped me come to terms with where I am in life's journey.
I’m not alone
When I first got off the path that I thought I was supposed to be on, I struggled with shame and feeling like a failure. Luckily, as I got brave enough to share how I was feeling with those around me, I started to realize that I was not the only one who was feeling that tension.
The world is filled with people whose lives are different from what they thought they would be—successful people, talented people, exciting people. In fact, I realized that very few people are immune from this feeling.
Part of it was being human. Most of us set goals for our lives when we were young. Before, we had a clear idea of what achieving those goals entails. We might have wanted to be a doctor growing up, but we rarely have a clear view of what it means to be a doctor. We had a goal to be married and have a kid by the time you are 30. But now you are still single with no signs of being married soon.
This is a part of the human journey. This helped me to realize that I wasn’t alone in this journey. At a certain point, we are all trying to figure out because we haven’t been here before
I’ve learned how to mourn.
As i’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m not alone in this journey and this is natural, I’ve also learned that I must mourn the past.
We typically think about mourning when we lose a loved one, but I’ve realized that you can also mourn just about anything you can lose.
In this case, I was losing an identity that I was building my future on. I was losing a vision for my future that I thought I wanted. I had to hold space to say go through the grief of losing the thing I thought I would be.
I had to let go in order to move forward.
I’ve learned to get to my core desires.
After I created space to mourn the loss of my identity and the ideas I had, I was now faced with the decision of how to move forward.
One thing that has helped me is reconsidering my goals. I started to get curious, asking questions like “Why did I want to achieve that?” and “What about that thing did I find appealing?” Questions like this helped me to get to the core of what I wanted.
I came to realize that I wanted to be a scientist because I wanted stability for my family, prestige for being known as being great at something, and an opportunity to experience cutting-edge technology.
From this, some of my core desires are stability, prestige, and innovation.
The amazing thing about this exercise is that it opens up the aperture to so many other things. I could go along many different paths as long as it falls in line with my core desires.
This is also very exciting to me because I now get to define success on my own rather than what others expect of me.
At the end of the day, it’s an ongoing process of change and reevaluation of what we want at different stages of our lives. What you wanted at 19 might change by the time you get to 29, and even that might change by the time you get to 59.
Give yourself permission to change because it’s going to happen any ways.
