Update for people who have been listening to me complain about my job for 2+ years: I quit my job recently! I don’t have another job lined up, but I am planning on committing to my career switch and looking for a full-time software engineering job. That being said, I think it will probably take a while (which I’m okay with), and I also need to take a break from work to recharge, so I’ve spent the past couple of weeks thinking about what I want to do with this year in the meantime.
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is how to trust myself more. It sometimes feels difficult to talk about, because my brain immediately imagines someone asking me “Well why do you have to quit your job to do that? Aren’t you just externalizing your problems?” But hey, this is my newsletter so I can say whatever I want.
I want to do a better job of explaining what “trusting myself” looks like. I think a part of it is that often see myself as a Ditto - like my skill and my job is to mould myself to meet the situation I find myself in.
And when I feel overwhelmed or like I’m encountering difficulty, I feel like Ditto when his transform attempts fail.
I think it’s easy for me to see myself this way because I do find myself interested in a lot of different things, but thinking about this Ditto analogy also makes me feel exhausted and sad. I just want to be one thing, whose obligation is just to evolve in its own course. I want to have weaknesses and preferences without worrying that my weaknesses are a failing or that my preferences are just a response to my weaknesses.
On that note, I think if there was a specific Pokemon I see myself as, it might be Exeggutor? See below.
Exeggutor contains multitudes, but each head still has its unique persona. It’s multi-faceted, but not infinitely malleable. Something from the Pokemon wiki entry on Exeggutor that I also found fitting was that each of its heads thinks independently. When they can’t agree on a direction to go in, they get stuck in place, but when they coordinate, their power is tripled.
So I guess my idea of learning how to trust myself is still a bit nebulous, but basically I want to find a better way to tame the multitudes within me. How to listen to the cautious, worrying part of myself without letting it paralyze me. How to embrace the adventurous part of me but also make sure that it follows through on the things it starts. How to nurture the ambitious part of me while reminding that it needs to rest, to plan, to pace itself, to embrace mistakes and not let itself become brittle with pride.
And most importantly, I want to be able to better filter the conventional wisdom, the things people say to me, the SEO’d career advice I read online and end up taking personally, through my understanding of myself. I want to have a year to live like an animal, unapologetic and matter-of-fact about its strengths, weaknesses, and needs, not self-conscious about where it came from or where it’s going. A year where I tell myself I’m not a Ditto and I don’t have to be one!
I also made a little graphic to better illustrate my feelings.
This is how I feel internally right now:
And this is how I want to feel:
"multi-faceted, but not infinitely malleable" love it and very excited for you!!