What happens when I don’t know what’s next

Life between the chapters

what do you do when you come home after travelling?

For the first time in my life, I don’t currently have a clearly defined goal, or structure, or purpose. I lived at home and went to school and worked in a café on Sundays. I left home to go to Uni and worked and played as hard as possible for 4 years. My partner and I moved in with his parents and worked in a golf club for a year and a half to save to go travelling. I arrived in Australia and immediately focussed on getting a place to live and a reasonably steady job that would keep me going for the next 7 months. I left Australia to travel New Zealand for 2 months. I returned to Australia to travel with my soon-to-be in-laws for 3 weeks. I popped over to Fiji to kill some time. I spent December in Melbourne with a family friend. I stopped off in Thailand on the way home. I returned to the UK and immediately set about finding my own place in a new city and a job to go with it.

And now, for the first time in my life, I am in a situation that doesn’t really have an end point. I can’t help but feel that I’m looking down an endless road with countless possibilities. Turnings that could take me in any direction that I wish. Options that seem to stretch on forever. I’m excited, obviously. And, in equal measure, I’m terrified.

The sheer endlessness of the options I have to choose from and the weird mix of impermanence and permanence might be more than I can handle. I don’t have an end goal. I don’t have a favourite path. I don’t have a clearly defined time period beyond which my current decisions won’t matter too much. This is a new experience for me and, if you hadn’t already guessed, I have no idea what to do.

Something that I am glad I learned so early on is that no one really has any idea what to do. Everyone’s kind of just making it up as they go along and as soon as I realised that I stopped being scared of not knowing what to do. What does scare me, isn’t that I don’t know what to do. It’s that I don’t know what I want. I suppose in the past it hasn’t ever really mattered too much. I could always just say ‘well, this is what I’m doing right now.’ I always knew my immediate goals and what I had to do to achieve them. Beyond that? That could be dealt with later. Well now it is later and I don’t know how to deal with it.

I was never really interested in video games but, when I was younger, I was partial to a bit of GTA (pick me, choose me. I know…) But it wasn’t the main missions that I was invested in, it was always the side quests. I have always loved side quests more than the main mission, in GTA and life. Side quests seem like less of a commitment in a strange way. If I’m unsuccessful or if I lose interest I can just say, ‘ahh it was only a side quest, I wasn’t really bothered.’

Side quests are so much more fun. Writing and drawing and yoga and reading and even cleaning the oven are certainly much more enjoyable than endlessly applying for jobs and ultimately being rejected. But what do I do when dyeing my hair doesn’t make me feel like a brand new person anymore and getting rid of more than half of my clothes doesn’t make me feel cleansed. What do I do when sitting in a new spot on the sofa or using a different blanket than I usually do doesn’t make things feel new.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I thought I would come home and settle down and find a new goal to throw myself into. I assumed it would be a job, a new career or maybe just something that pays the bills and lets me spend my money on the things I love. So far, however, that doesn’t seem to be working out. I’m not even sure what kind of job I’m looking for at the minute or whether I’ll even have one in the near future with the way things are currently going.

I was rejected for one job, not because they didn’t like me or because they didn’t think I would be a good fit, quite the opposite actually. I was rejected because they didn’t think that job was a long term option for me. They thought I was using it as a stepping stone before I found a job on a career path I actually wanted. How is it that these people seemed to know what I wanted when I didn’t even know that myself.

When I was travelling and constantly on the move I thought I was craving being in one place for longer than a few months. Even in Uni I thought I was craving not having to move house once a year. I thought I wanted a wardrobe of my own and to put my toiletries in a cupboard rather than just keeping them in the travel bag. I thought I wanted a mattress that I chose for myself and laundry that was washed in a machine that I didn’t have to insert coins into. Everything I thought I was craving that I now have, hasn’t scratched the itch I thought it would. It hasn’t satisfied the gap somewhere in my soul that I thought needed filling. That I thought I knew how to fill.

Where does that leave me? No, really, please tell me where that leaves me!

I’m starting to think that I have spent a very long time throwing myself 100% into the next goal I decided would be fun to achieve. Perhaps being constantly on the move, not always physically but often mentally as well, wasn’t as good for me as I thought it was. And now miles and miles of empty road lies ahead of me and I can’t find my map. The sat nav isn’t working. I don’t have signal on my phone. I have a flat tyre and I don’t know how to change it (although I do, in fact, know how to change a flat tyre). Whatever metaphor you want to use the sentiment is the same! Where am I and where am I going? And, for that matter, how do it get there?

What do you do when you slow down and don’t feel the peace you believed slowing down would give? What do you do when you thought stability would give your soul the comfort it needed? What do you do when your respectable, hard-earned degree doesn’t matter to anyone? What do you do when you apply for jobs every day only to receive endless scam calls in return? What do you do when the thing you poured all your energy into for the best part of 3 years is finished and you can’t find the next thing? I’m starting to think that my conception of this is screwed up. That there isn’t a next thing and there never was. As amazing as my life is, I have spent most of it distracting myself. And now I’m looking in the mirror and asking myself, what now? What happens when the story I thought I was writing ends? What happens when I finish a chapter and realise I might have actually finished the book? The answer is, simply, I don’t know. I don’t need to know. Maybe that’s the point.

Lib Howden