Living life forwards - reflections on making decisions

Like, I suppose, many third-year students I approach this Christmas season with some dread, not because of the festivities or the January deadlines, but because the end of this semester marks a halfway point through our final year – graduation is in sight (whatever graduation will look like in 2022, perhaps mortarboards with detachable face masks? Elbow-bumps from the dean?)

And I approach this time, again, like many of my colleagues and classmates, with some trepidation, at this impasse, this precipice, decisions decisions next steps and postgrads and careers all beckoning. A metaphorical crossroads, those dreadful places to be. This is something that has always plagued me ever since I was a teenage goth infatuated and overly identifying with Sylvia Plath (as one is wont to do) and the metaphor her semi-autobiographical character faces in The Bell Jar; sat in the crotch of a fig tree trying to decide which branch to take, starving in her indecision and watching as the figs of opportunities and decisions undecided shrivelled up at the ends of the boughs. Taking decisive actions and small steps are probably the sensible way to deal with that and yet we are told every journey starts with a single step. That step is the hardest, of course, because what if we put a foot wrong? It seems small now, but a plane flying one degree off course ends up 60 miles off target for every mile it flies – suddenly my plane is crashing into a bloody fig tree.

As I grow older I understand more and more the significance of these decisions- or not, actually. When you are younger the Big Decisions are few and far between, deciding what university to go to, what dissertation to write, what postgrad opportunities to take - they feel big because you’ve never made any other big decisions. In the course of a lifetime though each one of those feels small. I remember working with new mothers, watching them measure out ounces of food and tracking every mouthful their weaning six-month-old encountered, knowing full well that I did the same, but also that my son as a three-year-old once ate a chocolate button off the floor of a Victorian Line train before I could stop him. In the moment, the decisions feel the Biggest Ever but in the course of a lifetime, a career or a childhood, their significance wains. This is something I find myself trying to impart with all the wisdom of a mature-student on my younger classmates, knowing full well it will fall on deaf ears because it has to. Kierkegaard said life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards – this sounds reasonable enough to those young ears, but you cannot fully know it without age and experience. I say this with all the self-awareness of someone in my mid-thirties knowing now that at age fifty I will look back on myself now and scoff how little I know, how much I think I understand, hello future me.

But yes, I do try to use my wisdom (as my classmates call it, mortifyingly making me feel like a kindly grandmother and not one of their peers – more on the mature-student experience in a future blog if I don’t die of cringe from publishing this one) when they talk of facing these dilemmas at just 22 years old. Graduating from a traditional university path coincides with what is culturally referred to as a Quarter Life Crisis. If you believe in astrology (which I will not admit to because I believe in science and it is hard enough being a gothy woman who wears crystal jewellery and also is trying to make it in STEM without loudly admitting any woowoo proclivities) twentyfive years after your birth Saturn returns into your chart and messes everything up just at the time the world starts trying to sell you pension plans and parenthood.

Here’s the secret though, from one of those withered old oracle crones of fantasy stories: You don’t know who you are in your early twenties because that is exactly what your early twenties are for! This is one of the reasons I rejected traditional university and that path aged 18, because I could not fathom my A Level tutors and society and my family suggesting I should decide a university, a degree, pick a career aged just eighteen?! What a momentous decision to get into sixty grand of debt for, based on what? What GCSE subjects you liked? That one A Level English tutor (it’s always an English teacher isn’t it) who?turned you on to the joy of words? What concept did I have of jobs or careers at that age? How could I, ?when jobs exist now with words in the job description that did not even exist when I was eighteen. And now with the years and experience and jadedness of age surely I know that the number of people at eighteen or twenty-one who know what they want to do and actually pursue it and continue to want to do it are so so rare. And regardless of what you think you know, life will give you what it wants and what you least expect anyway – at 21 I was a mother and by 24 I was a single-mom, at 31 I lost my job unexpectedly and by the next?day I had applied for the degree I am soon to finish. In fact I think the people who do know what they want to do are people who decided in childhood, for whom vocational careers - a teacher, a fireman, a police-officer - were presented to them and fortunately those are career paths still available. Aged ten I wanted to be Indiana Jones and LinkedIn didn’t exist so I didn’t get a weekly digest of recruiters seeking archaeology professors with a penchant for danger.

I am at this point now where I feel I have options, but it’s not as simple as flying the nest or making it my home. I could go out into the world with all the optimism of a recent graduate and try to find my way in a career or a workplace. I can stay in academia; I could pursue that route probably quite happily and live out a fantasy that involves long hours in a library with a stained-glass window and a large stack of leatherbound books. I can go down a more clinical route, set my sights on the competitive - and let’s be honest terrifying sounding - Clinical Psychology training applications. Is it even possible to do both? Speaking to a clinpsy the other day who told me that time for research would be considered a luxury with her current caseload, evidently not. Is doing research a way to help people, without being the helper myself? Knowing that something like only 6% of people who have done a PhD will carry on in academia afterwards- does this knowledge help me or put me off? (For real though, having someone very smart and respected tell you that you too are smart enough to do a PhD, how is that not the ultimate temptation? Yes yes, I have reflected on my Conditions of Worth).

The other thing that I am really finding is how everyone has their own agenda that comes with their recommendations. No one in my family has studied above degree level, only four of us have even got that far. My mum suggested “yeah why not just put off getting a job for as long as you can?” in this incredibly working-class way that suggests that knowledge generation is not really work, (and ultimately just reflects on my mum’s opinion of me and my life choices tbh) as though fancying around with academia is the same as being one of those ladies who lunches. My lecturers on the other hand are all plugging their own Masters course or defending their own paths. One lecturer tells students that Counselling Psychology is where students with a 2:2 end up, the best students pursue Clinical Psych - and yet we are supposed to trust these people to shape our futures? Some of them have read my work and push me there and others have observed me in sessions and tell me I can demonstrate clinical skills. I realise now that what I want is the equivalent of those computer programmes we had in secondary school in the early 2000s where you answered personality style questions and it suggested careers path for you – being a teenage goth I would somehow always end up recommended to be an undertaker or a pest control exterminator. Does this exist now and is it sophisticated enough to make these decisions for me? Amazon will start advertising fifth birthday balloons two months before my son’s birthday because one time five years ago I bought a pregnancy test and then a week later a bottle of folic acid – surely the great algorithm in the sky is capable of this?

And of course I know myself very well and I have a lot of ideas of what I want to do – I am less swayed by external validation and things that look impressive to a recruiter, and I’ve had enough soulless jobs that I know I cannot do that to myself again just yet. The thought of being 22, with all these conflicting advisors and not a lot of experiences in discerning other’s motivations, not enough experiences to weight a pros and cons list (how do you know you don’t want to do something you have never done?) What a ridiculous place to be.

I suppose this is relevant and resonant to lots of us at this point in our lives, in our learning and probably in the world at the moment. I sound like I have no answers but actually I do have two suggestions. One is to force yourself to stop thinking that this is The Biggest Decision Ever, very few decisions ever are. And I say that as someone who has been married and already done a degree and moved cross country and is on what is probably the third iteration of my working life. You don’t have to decide forever today, just maybe tomorrow. Or a year from now. If we’re all going to be working till we’re seventy I am but a third of the way through my working life, those 22 year olds are merely foetuses to a capitalistic-career-driven society. Second, is that following the threads in your life, the things that light you up and interest you is probably the best advice anyone can give you. It will only make sense when you look on it backwards though I am afraid. At the moment your babysitting jobs, your work experience in retail, volunteering at the old people’s home, that module you took on developmental psych and the next role you have will all seem disparate and disconnected, but when you look back in ten or twenty or thirty years’ time, you’ll be one of those terrible cliches of a person dreadful though we are - who tells people just like you are now, that yes everything did happen for a reason.?