Are you a different person compared to only a few years ago?
Happy belated new year. Whilst I haven’t paid much attention to my public blog over the last few months and years, in recent time I’ve ramped up the frequency of my journal entries. Using a journal as a way to track my thoughts across the medium term has been useful to see if what I feel and what I do are intertwined in any way. As a result, finding out whether or not I’m on track to meet my goals becomes clearly apparent. Further, I’ve been questioning whether my goals from the past align with my present.
It sounds almost like a catch 22; you work out what you want to do in life, you set out to do it, and then by the time you cross the finish line and can start implementing those important and meaningful changes, you’ve become a different person. Your values may no longer align, or you’ve drifted off your chosen path. Which is it? Is it possible to work out the difference?
Throughout 2023, I want to redirect more energy into this conundrum and figure out just what I want to do with the future, as well as try and find ways to hold on to those feelings of inspiration in the present in order to make use of them in the future.
This whole situation reminds me of stories I’ve heard from university students who study all throughout high school with the goal of entering a particular industry. For arguments sake, let’s say a doctor:
They study tireless hours at high school to get the right entry score to their desired university, get accepted into their degree, get half way through their degree and realise that this is not what they want to be doing for the rest of their life. Even worse, they graduate and realise that the work doesn’t suit them whatsoever. Do you go back to the drawing board, or do you make use of your newfound knowledge and steer that energy in a new direction? Do you pave a new way forward, or follow the path worn down by those who have succumbed to the same fate?
Right now, I feel a little like the doctor who’s finished university and don’t know if what they’ve done is right for them. Sure, I find my field of study interesting, but the more I analyse the path that has let me to this position, the more I think that I was a different person making very different decisions as a result of a different social and political environment at the start of this journey.
At this point in time, I need to commit my 2023 to being a year of rediscovery; I must find what drives my day-to-day and harness that energy, but in order to do that, I need to return to what has driven me before. I’ve had that motivation before - I just need to rediscover it.
It’s in there somewhere.
