I wrote this idea a long time ago when I was making decisions about being a medic, but the scattered notes of this post stayed in my drafts folder. As I’m going through several major life transitions again, I felt it would be fitting to revisit this and share it.
I write in the context of my own career chapters, but I intend for this to be relevant for other decisions, such as career changes, new jobs, relationship changes, meeting new people, moving cities or countries, or any other life transition in which we realise something – even if small – will change from then onwards.
I’m making this a two-part series: one on making the decision in the first place, and the second on making peace with the decision once you’ve made it. I hope it resonates with others also going through seasons or chapters of their lives.
When we are on the brink of starting or ending a chapter, we often psychologically end up in either the past or the future. In the past, we worry about leaving something behind, or feel the chapter is incomplete, or perhaps worry if we did everything we could to close the chapter correctly. We may also feel grief: grief of the person we leave in that chapter, grief of the future we imagined had we continued, our alternative identity, and grief of the familiarity of it being a part of our (sometimes everyday) life.
Similarly, when we are psychologically in the future, worry and anxiety are prevalent. For example, worrying about what starting again is like (or what if it feels like it’s from scratch?), being a beginner again, the unknowns of what if it isn’t as good (or sometimes, continues to have elements we want to leave behind), and what if we do all of the right things and it still doesn’t work out how we imagined.
This can leave us in a psychological limbo where we sit at the boundary of change, but without taking the steps needed to close a chapter and start a new one. It can be hard to know when to actually make the decision when the mind is never present.
So how do you know when you’re ready to move forward? The unsatisfying answer is, you don’t always explicitly know. But there are signs in our intuition.
Multiple people have told me how they notice I say I’m going to do something and I go ahead with it, even hard things. I think there is truth to that. From the outside it looks like those decisions I made were brave. But I also had these anxieties and reflections that took me there. For me to decide to leave my job and start a new career, I had to reflect on whether I’m walking towards something or running away.
When we walk towards something, something is pulling us. We may find ourselves thinking less about the thing we are leaving behind and more about the new endearing chapter. The risk is wearing rose tinted glasses about the new, shiny thing, and not making a balanced judgement. But the advantage is that our energy and intuition sense that something about this new chapter fits right for us. Something is pulling us, and it’s worthwhile listening to that intuition. For me with medicine for example, I was drawn to the human experience, making a difference to the most vulnerable in society. Medicine had an allure that I did not fully understand as I had such little exposure to it, but it felt right. I can’t pinpoint it exactly – I mean, I must have done pretty well pinpointing it otherwise I wouldn’t have been interviewed everywhere I applied, even without a background in the natural sciences. It aligned with so much of what I was doing anyway that it was the natural next step. So I figured out how to do it, worked through my doubts, and did it anyway. I’m super proud of myself for taking that step and going for it, a lot because I know it was not easy to make that decision. I loved the career I had before medicine, and I was definitely not running away from that. But I listened to my intuition that I was being pulled towards something, and found myself in a top graduate entry medical school.
Alternatively, wanting to run away could be both because an environment has become toxic or because it’s simply not a good fit anymore. It could present as fantasies about being elsewhere, and it could be as strong as wanting to be literally anywhere but the present. For some particularly toxic scenarios, the safest thing to do is to leave at the earliest opportunity. There is the risk of making a suboptimal decision by selecting the first available option in haste. Going deeper, wanting to run away is a sign that something in our current chapter doesn’t fit with the life that feels right to us. Even deeper than that, there are specific values, lifestyles, or energies that are misaligned.
Identifying them, if safe and possible to do so, goes a long way in ensuring the new season is closer to the life we desire. For example, when I chose to leave medicine for many reasons including personal ones, it would have been easy to simply run away and go to the first available thing. But I thought more deeply about what was not aligned. These are not specific to my situation, but some questions could be, is it the lifestyle? The people? Something about the day to day? Is it an energy? Is it the feeling of emptiness or something being missing? What gave happiness and joy previously that feels lacking now? Is it your own confidence? If it’s a relatively new chapter, is it adjustment pain or is it truly not working?
By going to that deeper level, walking towards something becomes more possible, which in my experience is more likely to produce a healthier, more fitting decision than running away. I reframed my experience: career change doesn’t mean leaving everything behind and starting fresh. It means adding to your repertoire of life experiences (which I wrote about here). That reframe helped lead me to the career I have now which I absolutely love – I would not be in public health had I not added to my consulting career and chosen to do medicine, and then found how to combine my consulting skills with medicine and enter research. But first I had to go deeper.
In short, knowing when you’re ready to choose a new chapter isn’t linear – it takes a lot of reflection and back and forth, to find where you are being pulled towards. But what if you make a decision, but part of you still feels unsure or scared? The second of this two-part blog series discusses how to make peace with hard decisions.
Preeti Kaur 