I’ve been back from seven months of
traveling for about seven months now and working at one organization for about
six of them – so this has inadvertently become a not-traveling blog. 18 months
after graduating college, I finally got a job that is a
dream-job-at-this-stage-in-my-career, and I have a space of my own, and things
are really, genuinely good.
Back in sophomore year of college,
when I was looking for summer internships for the first time and feeling
anxious, I decided that a basic tenet of adult life was learning to live with
uncertainty. And for so long, not knowing whether and when I’d be employed and
how things would all work out, that was my refrain. There was a period there
where I wasn’t sure what country I’d be in next. (Though, you know, I usually
had a pretty good idea. I was never really a proper backpacker drifting in and
out of hostels and countries.)
As stressful as it was, there’s
adrenaline and rawness to searching for a job – a feeling of living right on
the edge of your version of the known world. There’s a sense of endless possibility,
even if it’s clouded by anxiety – every time you see a promising listing on
Idealist and get your hopes up, you’re trying on a different life.
Now that I’ve attained the holy
grail of my post-collegiate life (a real, live 9-to-5 – be still my heart!)
(I’m not being sarcastic; I am genuinely thrilled by this) things have switched
up, and I’ve found that I have to learn to live with stability, with certainty.
With living my daily life as it is instead of always looking for, trying to
conjure up, what’s next. It’s weird to be looking down an indefinite span of
days that will all be roughly similar, without the natural rhythms of the
academic year to provide purpose and punctuation, rising and falling action. It’s
also scary, in a way – you got what you wanted; is it living up to what you
imagined it would be? And it’s given me the mental space to step back from the short-term
pursuit of employment to consider the bigger questions about where my career
and life are headed, and that’s a bit daunting, too.
None of that is to say that I would
switch places with my unemployed self (at least the unemployed self who’d
returned to America). But I’m afraid that certainty will make it easy to become
stagnant, and I’ll find myself looking up from my desk in five years and
wondering where the time went. So I’ve resolved to use my rootedness for
pursuits that were harder to pursue when I was itinerant or devoting all my
free mental space to finding a job, to invest in the daily life I worked to
achieve, to stay aware and awake, to grow in place.
