It could be over a few months, like a new job where one day you feel like actually going to work thinking, hey I actually like these people and don’t mind working here.
Or when your friends have been super busy for months and suddenly you get matched on dating apps, old friends reach out and people want to buy your old junk on Craigslist in a single day.
its called growth
I was in highschool suffering from multiple mental health disorders and social isolation. I was smart sure, but as I later learned you can’t outsmart your own brain. What it took was finding a girl, as studious and hard working as me, but even more stressed and destroyed by home life and a destructive boyfriend that preyed on their undiagnosed autism and major depression. It started when I simply told them that their emotions mattered, that they mattered as a person. Suddenly I was confronted with a person in their most stressful senior year, previously a danger to their own self, offloading their sorrows to me in need of anything resembling emotional support.
I had to learn (the hard way sometimes) how to listen, and listen with intent. I felt this urge, this duty to help, no matter how little I could do with how I was faring. I felt like if I didn’t do this, I would regret it for the rest of my life. It eventually lead to friendship into a relationship on fundamental compatibility, but I didn’t have any of those feelings at the beginning. I just accepted their texts, their calls, the first ones I had ever made to someone outside of school. It was the first time I ever felt I had a purpose. It was the first time I felt like I could do what was right, rather than what was expected.
Our relationship is rekindling as we both near college graduation. We’re far more stable now, but we crave our scant few hours shared on weekends. I can feel my life trajectory flying wildly out of prediction as the day they move in with me nears. However, I know that if it was anything like the last time, I can afford to be bold and to be true to myself. It’s one thing for your life trajectory to change, but it’s another to be committed to making it as good as possible.
My senior year of college right before graduating with a history degree, I bought a canon rebel t3i after watching a short film that made me go “I want to make these.” I don’t do narrative work anymore, but I’ve got some film fest screenings notched on my metaphorical bat and I produce content for a tech startup now with excellent healthcare and a solid salary. Wife, kids, the whole deal.
Still have that rebel, it’s one of the few things in my life that I can point to and go “this thing changed everything.“
Yeah. It was so dramatic I knew it would happen again, and waited for it to catch it in the act.
I’m super smart, but also super lazy. I think I’m lazy because I’m smart. School was super easy for me, so I was always bored. I got poor grades overall because I didn’t do the work. I could show up and crush the tests, but felt that homework was a waste of time and never did it. I took AP classes that give college credit, got a weak grade in the class but got 4s and 5s on the AP test. (Out of 5).
Poor grades in highschool meant I couldn’t get into college right away. So I took a few years off and just sort of hung out for a bit. Then the click. I decided I wanted to go to college, not just any, but a really good school. So I went to the local junior college and asked the counselor how I could go there next year. He explained that the transfer program is a two year program, but I wanted to go next year. He said I probably won’t succeed, but here’s a schedule of classes that will get me the two years of credits in one year. 24 units per semester for two semesters. I got straight As. I just did all the work and crushed it. Got into my dream school and studied… philosophy.
Don’t get me wrong, it was what I wanted to study. I got a great education, but it didn’t set me up for a real job after school, more for grad school, but I felt like I was done with school for a while. I ended bartending and waiting tables for years. It was in this phase that I started thinking about that click. Something in me elevated me to get into my dream school within a year once I decided I wanted to. I found peace in that fact. I knew that despite my toiling, working hard just for rent, making it month by month in the city, that I’d elevate myself again when the time was right. I thought a lot about it. That one year of 48 units and straight As was such a blur, what was it that drove me? I was so confident it would just happen again though that I decided to try to consciously catch it in the act.
Sure enough it happened again. Enrolled in a coding boot camp. One year of absolute blur, crushed it, became a successful software engineer. I failed to notice while it was happening, but did think right after: “fuck that was it, that was the thing, I was right, it did happen again!”
Turns out I’m bipolar and was just making the most of my manic upswings.
Yep. At 18 I was hard set on going to college for game design. About a week into classes, I just up and decided “wait, this isn’t the right thing right now”, dropped out and continued my day job for 3 years before going to another college for software development. It wasn’t really the plan, but thinking about it now, it was a good move to switch from game design to more generally software.
A couple months before graduating, I landed a solid job on the other side of the country (US), finally moved out on my own and grew my career. Now I’m in the same field but making six figures, married, own a house, and fun hobby cars.
