Lost in Transition

I am a creature of habit. I like the stable, familiar, and comfortable. I am not a huge fan of change, it just kind of stresses me out. Generally, I dislike every new thing for at least a month. I remember one of my placements in grad school was at Columbus speech and hearing. I came home from the first day and I hated it! I remember telling my friends what a long quarter it was going to be because of this placement. On my last day of the quarter, I cried. I didn’t want to go. By the end of the quarter, I loved it there! I don’t like new things. For most of my life though, I have generally been able to prepare myself for transitions, for new things. I new when I moved, that I wouldn’t like my house for a little while, I new I wouldn’t like working for a while… I was prepared to feel uprooted and unstable. Right now, I am in the second year of working at my office, this is my second year in my house…my life is pretty stable and consistent…or is it? I went home this past weekend for Thanksgiving. I LOVE going home because I love my family and I have a handful of friends that I’ve known since high school and I love seeing them. I was talking with my friend Morgan who is finishing her master’s degree in Philadelphia, and I asked her if she was going to move back to Ohio or stay in Phili, or go somewhere else. She said she didn’t know. She looked at me and said, “it doesn’t end, does it; this whole not knowing what you want to do with your life.” I responded with, “no, I don’t think it does.” I truly thought that, when I picked speech pathology, I found what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Now, I love my job, but I have a whole list of other things that I would like to do. So I find myself actually thinking, “what am I going to do next year?” “Where am I going to live?” “Am I going to move back to Cleveland, or to California?” “Maybe I will go back to school?” There is this glamorous notion that when you are done with school and you start your first job that you are “set”. I thought I was “set”…I know where I want to live, I know what I want to do, I know who my friends are, I know what I think/feel about life. Those have all been challenged for me this past year, and I am getting the sense that they always will.