A rumination on hills and valleys from Switzerland.

Outside of my family and my inner circle of friends, not many people know how tough the last four and a half years have been for me, I am thankful to have a robust support system, there is always somebody to talk to, I am fortunate. Mostly, things have always gone according to plan academically and professionally. At around 25, I realized I was deeply unhappy with my life even though I literally accomplished almost everything I had on my life plan that I plotted out as a teenager.

I turned 28 in Boston and I remember feeling a sense of emptiness and anxiety about the direction my life was taking. I remember the very moment so vividly when for the first time I didn't get something I really wanted (a summer internship with the Gates Foundation after making it to the final round for two roles and being selected as an alternate for one). From that point on from Spring 2018 to late 2020, it was just disappointment after disappointment, and, adding to that I felt burnt out. There was this deep and lingering feeling that I had been on a hamster's wheel since moving to the U.S.A in March of 2002.

I never take time to savor any accomplishment or the reaching of a goal, it's always on to the next thing, this constant state of self-inflicted pressure, agitation, and dissatisfaction with where I was in life. Truly, I was perpetually unhappy, that's the best way to describe my emotional state of affairs. There were moments that would be distracting, and alleviating: traveling, hanging out with my family and friends, being in Jamaica, but in those moments when you're alone in the wee hours of the morning and you're allowing your mind to wander, and it leads you to a sense of inadequacy, again..."more".

The thing about "success", is it's never enough, there's the constant drive that you need to be doing more, accomplishing more, and it got to a breaking point just before my birthday last summer where I just had to take a breather, so I quit my job a month and a half later and bid Atlanta adieu, and for six months I traveled to see my closest friends and family, spent about 60 days in Jamaica (the most time I have since 2012 and 2009), spent time with my parents like I haven't done since I left for college in 2007. It was one of the best decisions I've made.

It's not enough to be only happy for a couple weeks out of the year when you are on vacation with your friends or at home spending time with family. It's imperative that we enjoy our day to day and take time to appreciate the little things, because time isn't jogging, you'll look up and 5-10 years will zoom by, and this thing we call life is tenuous and the time we have on Earth is ephemeral. So find and treasure your moments of happiness regularly and cherish those memories.

Now let's delve deeper into rejection. Rejection and failure are things I often spend a lot of time thinking about. I applied to 6 colleges (Wake Forest, Cornell, Vanderbilt, Emory, University of Florida and Rollins College), for my master's I applied to: Yale, Emory, Duke, and George Washington University. In 2016 I applied to Harvard and Johns Hopkins for my DrPH. And...I also applied to Harvard Business School on a lark after doing well on the G.R.E. I got my first rejection from a school a few months later. It's something I almost never think about.

In summer 2020 I recruited with Mckinsey (Atlanta) and Boston Consulting Group (Atlanta) and had the worst interview of my life, and didn't get out of the first round for either. In summer 2021 I recruited with Mckinsey (Miami) and went all the way, but I didn't quite get there. The recruiter told me over lunch that as she was watching the live comments come in from my interviewers she had the feeling like this could have gone go either way. My final interview with a partner was the best one, we just hit it off, the interview went over by about 20-25 mins. When he called me that night to give me the rejection he also told me that the decision was split, we talked for about 40 mins and now he's somebody I consider a friend and mentor, and we've met up in Miami, and we video chat regularly.

Heretofore, one of my biggest regrets was not applying to the Princeton Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (now SPIA), during my senior year of high school 06-07. History and International Relations are my first and undying loves. Since my GRE scores didn't expire until December 31, 2021, and I had an application fee waiver, and I didn't have any concrete plans for after Harvard, but knew I wanted to be a diplomat in some way shape, or form, I applied to Princeton's two-year MPA program in International Relations which is fully funded.

3 weeks ago, I got rejected, and it was the easiest rejection of my life, I didn't even feel that initial pang, and I know it's not solely because I decided at the beginning of February when I accepted the job in Geneva that I wasn't going to go even if I got accepted. It was because I'm at peace about shutting some doors, keeping some slightly ajar, locking some and throwing away the key, and all the permutations in between.

I'm the happiest I've been since I was probably 12-14 years old, moreover, I'm at peace with the things I won't get to do, and the dreams and aspirations I'll quite simply have to let go into the wind and into the land of the fanciful and what could have been.

So I'm now 12-14 from the field, not too shabby.