Happy Monday everyone! How are you? How was the weekend? Mine involved working a fair bit so I'm not feeling totally fresh this morning, but fresh enough.
I haven't posted a word of the month post this year because I couldn't really settle on just one word - sometimes assigning yourself something just because it's the beginning of the month doesn't feel all that genuine does it? So instead I waited for the word to come to me, and while I've spent a fair bit of time the past couple of weeks working through finding my own voice and reprioritising some things, a word that keeps coming back to me is 'clarity.'
I feel like a lot of my 'wants' have got lost lately. This past year or so I've tried and experimented with a lot of new things and projects. Which in itself has been great, and scary and challenging, and rewarding after all If we don't try something new how do we know whether or not we're missing out on something? But in all that newness I've got lost. I'm try things without evaluating. I feel things with out evaluating, and at the moment I do things, without evaluating (before or after!).
I say yes to new opportunities because I want to find out if I like them. I'm working a maternity cover position which gave me an opportunity to work out if I liked this position. I buy new clothes because I wanted to try something different, and I've done all these things to see if I liked them, without ever answering my own question.
Do I ACTUALLY like them?
I have a lot of questions in my life at the moment. Big scary questions, that may never have a concrete answer.
What do I want my next career step to be?
Why do I do the work I do?
Why is this thing making me feel so anxious?
Where has my confidence gone in this situation?
These are things I need to work through. Questions that won't answer themselves.
At the moment my life feels a bit like when you're set an essay title.
I've spent all this time doing research. I have professional opinions, and quotes, coming out my ears. I have whole dossiers of research and experiment results. I've photocopied chapters out of books, I've hundreds of post it notes with valid points of thought on, and I can tell myself I've done the work. But the essay still isn't written, and I have yet to answer the actual question.
That's what I'm working on at the moment, except this particular essay question (which for those who have got a little lost in this post is: what am I doing with my life?) isn't one I can simply answer, submit and then immediately forget about. It's one that will forever be in draft. Sure it will be in pretty good shape for a couple of months, but then a new piece of research will come out, and my essay will once again be returned to me with annotations in the margins and new points to consider.
But that's ok.
I don't need a perfect answer, I just need clarity. A good structure, a point to argue, a well reasoned thought process that's easy to follow... for now. It might take one all nighter for me to get the first draft done or I might still be harping on about this very same thing in 6 months time, but for the sake of labeling this blog post neatly, lets just say 'Clarity' is my word of the month. What's yours?
Here's to finding some answers, and for once in my life not leaving my essay to the last minute x
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