Knowing the difference between giving up and re-evaluating

About this time a year ago, I quit my dream job. I was working for a prominent event planner… About this time a year ago, I quit my dream job. I was working for a prominent event planner as an ad-hoc intern, learning the particulars and secrets of a career field that I thought might one day become my own. I shook the hands of state senators and newspaper editors and wrote sponsorship proposals for more money than I will probably ever make.

I also didn’t sleep. And I began to worry so much about meeting my boss’s expectations and needs that my own schoolwork started to suffer. A job that I had solicited – that had been a favor for a naive, overzealous college student – soon became too much to handle. Nevertheless, I felt indebted for the opportunity and refused to consider leaving.

That was until my mother uttered six little words over the fuzzy line of a cell phone: You can change your mind, Lindsey. It was something I would never consider. I was the one who had written letters requesting employment, I was the one who unwaveringly declared my dedication throughout the pin-striped interview and I would be the one to “stick it out.”

But how do you “stick out” something that is making you miserable? How does your own well-being and happiness become secondary to the expectations of someone or something else? Can one decision commit you to months or years of dissatisfaction? I think that, unfortunately, such a thing happens all the time.

Despite my past experience, I think I may have made another devastating error in judgment. I majored in something merely because I liked it. And now that the million-dollar question for college seniors – what are you doing with your life? – is resonating in my ear almost daily, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve spent four years zealously preparing myself for a life I don’t want.

I can speak Spanish, but I have little desire to translate or teach it. I’ve studied Isabelle Allende right along side David Sedaris and yet realize the starving-artist implications in saying I want to be a novelist. As a Spanish and fiction major, these eliminations must leave me at the door of a graduate program, right? But then the question becomes which school and when?

Nevertheless, as this self-inflicted assault of doubts on my college career arrives just months before my graduation, the concept of changing my mind could never be more relevant.

My mother is a real estate agent that majored in psychology. My father, who was certified to teach high school math when he graduated from college, is a business analyst for American Electric Power. What has become significant in their careers is, of course, a university degree, but more importantly an ability to grow and to change with the job market. Both have found a medium between what they’re good at, what they enjoy doing and what people will hire them for. And neither has been afraid to “change their mind” a little bit along the way.

So, as April draws closer and more of my peers are drawing up job offers, I don’t think it’s foolish of me to take comfort in the fact that I still don’t have an answer to the million-dollar question. Maybe I’ll write that elusive novel. Maybe I’ll speak a little Spanish. But whether it’s a genuine ignorance about my own interests or just a fear of committing to a certain path, the confidence that results in accepting that yes, I can change my mind seems more valuable to me than anything.

I’ve found that this attitude of “nothing is final” grants a freedom from relying on what I should do and creates a certain kind of self-trust. Whether in considering a job or a major or the simple agreements that we make with one another every day, this trust is able to differentiate between procrastinating and taking the necessary time to make a good decision. It also realizes the difference between just giving up and having the wisdom to know when something isn’t working in our own lives.

If you believe that nothing is permanent but change, e-mail Lindsey Anderson at lsa2@pitt.edu.