Life as a matter of choices

It's 2am now and I can't seem to fall asleep, it must be the tea I drank at 10pm that's causing my insomnia right now. So while I'm lying on bed now staring into black (literally) space, I decided that I will do some reflection on how this year has been so far for me.

Here's a picture just to depict what I'm looking at now lol.

This year has been one filled with extreme emotions, a year full of change, a year which saw me push myself past my limits and tip myself out of the comfort zone that I was stuck in for way too long.

I left my previous job in April, and for the first month I felt a sense of liberation and happiness. No more waking up at ungodly hours for shift work, no more replying emails, no more OT, no more reports to write. Everyday was just waking up, exercising, playing with my dogs, catching up on Netflix, eating and sleeping. Repeat. Repeat again. It honestly felt so good living a life with seemingly no worries at all.

Seemingly because deep down I had this nagging abomination of irresponsibility towards my life. Was it impulsive of me? Was it the herd mentality? Was I just finding all sorts of excuses for myself to escape from reality?

I couldn't give myself an answer. And honestly I don't think I had an answer for myself. All I felt was extreme disappointment in a girl who friends looked up to as someone who never gives up in anything that she does. And here I am, letting go in the face of uncertainty. I guess it didn't help that the parents were breathing down my neck and further attesting to the fact that I made a wrong choice giving up on a job that paid me well.

I was caught in this never-ending dilemma. One of trying to find any job quickly versus being ultra selective so that I can find a job im truly passionate about. But in this dilemma I find myself warped up in another dilemma. #dilemmaception What exactly am I passionate in? What if the things I thought I am good at doing and am passionate about turned out to be far from right?  

I pondered over these thoughts not knowing where I was heading towards in life. Kinda like a headless chicken running along a long, empty road that never seemed to cease. Before I knew it three months flew by and I was still at status quo. No job, no clue in what I want to do with my life.

Anxiety kicked in and thoughts of "just spamming resumes to any company" kept flooding my mind. I knew that was the wrong mindset. The same wrong mindset that led me to a bad decision, resulting in my departure from my previous job. But i didn't care. All I could think of was "I need a job, I need to get my life back on track."

I spammed resumes for a few days, and then some. But I don't know what happened but I guessed you could say I got lucky? Just when I was ready to accept fate and take any job offer that came my way, a company that I would kill to get in contacted me for an interview. 13 pages. That was the number of pages of questions I had prepared for the interview. I have never ever prepared so hard for an interview before. It was as if I was back in university again, preparing for finals. It was my dream job and I was dying to get in.

But as fate would have it, I guessed my luck ran out. I passed all the rounds of interview but failed at the final one because I lacked the technical skills they needed in the candidate taking up the role. What was I doing in the past three months when I could have picked up a new skill and ace this interview? Life is unpredictable as such, you take things for granted until the opportunity brushes past you, and by then regret comes too late and begging comes to naught.

I signed up for a course on that very day I got rejected by my dream company. It was a computer coding skill which I would never, never in the life of me learn unless I really had to. Despondency brought out the competitive spirit in me. I did not want to be the cause of any lost opportunities again. I'm really glad I did it, because coding turned out to be amazingly interesting and nothing like what I pictured it to be - boring and confusing.

In the midst of all this, I found a job. Not a job at my dream company, but a job I know I can confidently say I enjoy doing - not passionate about (at least it's too early to say now), but definitely not something I accepted "out of desperation". And looking back on the past five months, I regretted nothing. Phases of emotions I experienced over the past five months eventually led me back to a sense of calmness and balance. Five months was all it took to push me out of my comfort zone into this cruel world of uncertainty. 24 years of choosing to live in my own comfortable bubble ; now revived and renewed.

Life is a matter of choices. You choose what you want in life. To live within walls and be comfortable, or to step out and embrace challenges that come your way. You decide your life and no one has the right to intervene, because it is YOUR life and your own responsibility.

I am super excited about my new job and what is to come. And to my dream job, I guess you will have to wait for awhile. Perhaps by then my perspective and goals would have shifted, and my definition of what constitutes a dream job would have changed.

Guess I will never know until it comes.