This draft has been sitting in here, half written, rewritten and rewritten again, since my birthday.
Here’s what I wrote initially:
The simple answer is no, I did not think, a year ago today, I’d be where I am right now.
I thought I’d be in San Francisco. Or Colorado.
While staring at the mountains this morning on the train ride to the office, I remembered running in the prairie back home in the morning, and as I crested a hill, I would ask myself: would I give this view up for a view of the ocean, mountains and the unknown? There was a moment of hesitation before answering “yes” and cruising on down the hill to continue with my run. As the year progressed, there was less hesitation. I was actually looking forward to a change of scenery, be it San Francisco, Colorado or Vancouver. It was time to move elsewhere. The question that hung in the air was where.
A year ago today it wasn’t clear I’d be moving to Vancouver and joining Clio as a full time employee. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, either. While Colorado and San Francisco are also far, they are still in the States. Vancouver is in Canada, which presents a completely new set of challenges, as you’ve no doubt been reading about already. My pro/con list for moving to Vancouver was literally even. Mom’s health issues tipped the scales, but after a series of talks and test results, the list was even again.
There was nothing to do but wait for Fate, in the guise of Canadian Customs, to decide.
I hate waiting. I’ve gotten better at it, though. Going with the flow, finding and maintaining my Monet distance. I’ve gotten good at doing that, too. I’m more aware of when I’m getting too close and need back back off. I’m more aware of my thought process, the path that leads to that point and I find ways to redirect.
Did I think I’d be able to do that a year ago? No. A year ago I wasn’t quite aware either. The fallout of being laid off still hung over me, and smacked me in the face with each job interview. The more I did them, the better I got at mentioning it without expanding on it more than necessary. Being laid off was common by that point, so there wasn’t the stigma there had been a year or two before.
And then I stopped and left it alone.
The simple answer is still no, and I find myself wondering: does it matter?
I haven’t found myself anywhere I thought I’d be. I never thought I’d get into a private high school. I applied to one college solely because it had the best journalism program for newspapers and magazines in the country. I wanted to write for Sports Illustrated. I was obsessed with writing for Sports Illustrated, actually. I often hid it in my Latin book and read it during class. I had its style down pat, its organization and layout. What issues came out when, and when they would have had to have gone to press to make the ship date for timely delivery. Primed and ready.
Except my journalism classes were incredibly boring. The more I advanced, the more boring they became, relative to my other classes. I developed other interests, broadened my horizons and decided I could not spend the rest of my life on the road, going from Triple-A dugout to Triple-A dugout, if I was lucky, writing the same story that had two variations: score and opponent.
At times, I think my decision to drop my journalism degree in favor of my English degree was when my career path become the long and winding road. Or a journey of self-discovery, to put it in a better light.
I master things quickly. And if there isn’t a new challenge, I get bored. I get bored, I start looking for something else, something more engaging. That’s taken me from container shipping exports to online marketing to technical writing, community management and, well, who knows where next. The linear path I expected has been anything but, and not always by my own doing.
Another way to look at it: where exactly am I today? Aside from the obvious answer of being in Vancouver instead of Chicago.
I don’t know that I can answer that yet as I don’t know if I have one. My mental self is undergoing a transformation, a rejiggering of its thought patterns as it absorbs the events of the past four years, identifying patterns previously unacknowledged and, well, struggling to reroute them. Make them more beneficial. It’s not even to a point where I can clearly articulate it, let alone answer it.
I do know I am closer to where I want to be than I was a year ago. Ask me again in a year.