Hey guys!
So today I want to talk about something exciting and also scary! Starting a new season in your life.
I am 26 going on 27 in January and as I have hit my mid to late 20's so many things have changed in this new season of my life. Friends have come and gone, I have figured out more of who I am and I have also recently switched from a part time retail management job into what some would label a "real world" job at a local hospital working as a manager for their IT support desk (I know it sounds super fancy right?). Through all of this transitional time I have learned so much about who I am as a person and who I want to be when I grow up (because let's face it I still don't consider myself to be an adult quite yet). So I wanted to share some of the things I have learned in the past few months to a year in the hopes of helping one of you who may also be going through a transition in your life.
I have learned transitions are NOT EASY! There are a lot of "growing pains" when you are moving from one season of your life to the next and through a lot of these growing pains you learn so much more about who you are.
The transition from going full force in graduate school to graduating and also no longer being labeled as a student was a huge growing moment for me. I had to learn who I was without that label. Our entire childhood and young adult lives we are in school and we are a part of that type of environment and it becomes a huge part of who we are and how we label ourselves. Being in an academic environment is like being in a different world (especially graduate school). When you're in graduate school you are around the same small group of people for two years and you grow accustomed to that environment so when you graduate and none of that is the same anymore it can be difficult. I know I really struggled with it post grad because most of my friends went back to their hometowns or moved away to new jobs and new cities and we all separated. Thankfully I had a community of friends through theater who were all still right here with me but that didn't make the separation from those other people any easier. I have learned through life that a big part of growing up is learning to move with the ever changing tide of friends who come and go from your life. In this time of my life I learned the hard way that even though we may want friends to be in our lives closely forever they aren't all going to be that way and it is just a part of life that helps us grow.
Through this transition more concentrated on myself. In my experience of my mid twenties so far I have learned that though you may have people around you who care and love you the most important person who should care and love you is yourself. In most of my adolescent and young adult life I struggled heavily with loving myself as I was. Being confident in myself is something I have really had to work on (especially over the past year) and I have learned so much about myself and I have put in so much more love and time for myself that it has really had an impact on my life. I had a very hard realization of my self worth and how others around me were treating me and I had to make some really tough choices and let some people who had been in my life for my entire adulthood go because I realized I deserved better than what I was getting. That was a hard realization to come to and it is still a sore spot for me even today but I know that in the long run it was the right decision to make. Through this realization I also had to slowwwww down. I realized that I was constantly going and doing things and not giving myself enough time to just sit and be alone with myself because I was scared of what I would find when left to my own devices. That was just a part of self discovery that I had to go through. I had to learn to be at peace with myself and learn to enjoy doing things alone. I always depended on other people to pull out my personality and to feed off of and when I actually sat down and thought about it I realized I needed to be building those things up within myself and not relying on others.
Starting a new season can be so difficult because as humans we don't really like change. I know I for one used to hate when anything changed because it meant I had to get out of my comfort zone. Learning to accept changes and start again are some of the biggest challenges in adulthood and I think it's something that never goes away and people who are good with change have learned from their previous seasons of life and friendships and have managed to learn how to accept the changes and keep living their best lives. If there was any advice I could give to you if you are going through the closing of one chapter and the beginning of another it would be to roll with the punches. Life will 100% never go to plan. There will always be curve balls thrown your way and learning how to deal with that is so important to ensuring you stay the happiest you can be.
I hope that this has helped some of you who may need a kick to end a certain chapter that you know needs to end or if you have already ended that and are trying to figure out how to move on to the next. Just remember without these moments in life there would never be growth. You can do anything you set your mind to.
xoxo Jess.
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