Choices and Change

I really did not know what I was going to title this blog post. I really do not know what I am going to say as I am writing it but that is okay. Much like this blog post, my life for the past few years has been uncertain, a lot has changed and it will continue to change and be uncertain for the foreseeable future.

I am not working at the moment and I have a lot going on. I cannot go into some aspects of my life right now but at the moment I am waiting on some decisions and perhaps, after those decisions have been made, my life will be a little more certain. Because of what has been happening in my life I have thought about choices as well as change. I will first talk about choices.

I suppose we make choices from the time we are young children. We choose who our friends are, we choose if we will listen to our parents and we choose if we will do our homework. The choices as a young child are quite often simple and there are generally no long term consequences for our choices. As we get older, our choices become more important and the consequences become more serious. We may not get the mark we want in year 12 or we may meddle with drugs and alcohol or crime and the consequences from that can be far reaching. We may take dangerous and foolish risks and many teenagers do this without thinking. Then there are other choices, a big one we have to make as we finish high school, what career do we want?

I have always struggled with why society expects a teenager around the age of 18 to know what they want to do with the rest of their life. At 18 I was obsessed with the show Law and Order:SVU and I wanted a career in the criminal justice field, for a long time I considered a career as a criminologist, in fact I started studying it but found, very quickly that it was not something I wanted to do. I have had many jobs since that time and none have even come close to criminal justice. Even now, as I sit here writing this, I have no idea what I am going to do for the rest of my life, there is always writing but it is very hard to make a living out of it, but I digress. Why do we expect 18 year olds to know what career they want? I know very few people who knew what they wanted to do at 18. The majority of people I know have changed career at least once, or are currently working towards a career in a totally different field to what they currently do. I am writing a book at the moment and there was no way I would have thought I would ever do that when I was 18. I guess what I am trying to say is that it is okay not to know what you want to do, it is okay to not know what choice to make.

Now I come to change. I have written about change on my blog before, the last few years has come with a lot of change, both good and bad and sometimes neither, just different. Change can be overwhelming, it can be exhausting and scary, the unknown always is. It can also be exciting, good and exactly what we need.

All the change that has happened in my life in the past few years has been, at times, terrifying. Starting a new relationship was exciting and also terrifying at the same time, changes to the family dynamic, even things as simple as changing houses were exciting, terrifying and at times exhausting but most of the changes have worked out for the better. Some of the changes I wish didn't happen and I am currently working to make better but that is part of life.

I have been thinking of a career, I know I need change and right at this minute I am not in a position to work but hopefully that will change soon. I have spent many hours trawling the internet to think about what career I want going forward. I know that I will never go back to any of the jobs I have had in the past, some I can no longer see myself doing and others just were not right for me. I am very lucky and grateful that I have an amazingly supportive partner who understands what I am going through right now and why I cannot work and works to help support both of us, he reads this blog normally so hopefully he will see this and see how grateful I am to him.

I have struggled a lot with choices I have made in the past and the changes that have happened the last few years a lot recently and then I sat and thought about it properly. Everyone makes mistakes. Some people make bigger mistakes than others but it is part of life and quite often you learn something from them and some mistakes can be made into a positive learning experience. After my last relationship ended I often thought about the choices I had made that led to to that relationship, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I learnt what to look  out for in the future.

The changes that have happened recently I have struggled with even more. I don't like change at the best of times and a lot of these changes were beyond my control, which I liked even less, but some of the changes have worked out to be good, others not so much. The wonderful thing about change is there is always the option of the situation changing again.