Hello everyone, hope you are all doing well amidst this crazy COVID-filled summer we’ve had! As you may have seen on my Instagram, I recently went on a bit of a trip around BC and into Alberta. It was definitely a different experience to be travelling during COVID, but it was still pretty spectacular. I will dive into more of the trip details in my next few posts, but today I want to talk about something else that has happened recently: renewing my work contract for another year of my current position. I am very excited to be continuing on in my position for another year, and this renewal has prompted me to reflect back on what the past year has been like.

It is crazy to believe that I graduated just over a year ago, and have now completed my first full year of work as a full-blown ‘adult’, if you want to call it that. Time flies and it is interesting to look back and see how the journey has gone over the past year.

To be honest, it has been quite a bumpy ride. Adjusting to being an ‘adult’ and no longer a student has been much more challenging than I anticipated. I suppose I got so used to being a student that it was difficult to no longer be in that state, juggling a million different tasks and priorities at once. Things feel much simpler now as my main focus is on my career and my current position. At the same time, no longer having all of these priorities has left me with a lot of opened up time that I am uncertain what to do with. It has felt confusing for me to suddenly be in a place where I don’t know what to do with myself. My identity has been tied to being a student for a long time, and now that I am no longer a student, it feels as if my identity is changing as well – and I am uncertain about where it is going now.

Dealing with this uncertainty can be very exciting for some people, and there is a certain air of excitement when you don’t know what is coming next. For me, though, a large portion of my life (my career) is set in place while the rest of it is not. It presents an interesting dichotomy of definitive plan versus a wide open plethora of options, and many times it feels to me like a scale tipping out of balance. Trying to cultivate this balance is something I have written about quite a bit over the past year, and it is still something I am struggling with. I am hopeful that as time goes on I will get better at this skill, but we will have to see where the road of life takes me.

I am immensely thankful to be in a position I enjoy and have a career path that I love. I feel very lucky to have found this quite early on in my career, and I am excited to see where it will continue to go. However, my life outside of my career feels much more up in the air and it has been, and still is, difficult for me to get my footing in this area. I wish I could say that everything fell into place and I mastered being an adult post-graduation, but that simply isn’t the case. The transition has been quite the ride, and external factors such as moving, relationships, and COVID have definitely had an impact as well.

I think it will take some for me to get this whole adulting thing figured out. It will take some introspection to sort out what a fulfilling life outside of work is going to look like for me, and that is something I am currently working on. In the mean time, I am doing my best to enjoy the ride and hang on when it gets rocky! I would love to hear your tips and experiences with adulting, let me know in the comments 🙂 and don’t forget to follow my Instagram and Facebook for the most recent updates. Cheers to all of you adulting and killing it out there!!