Excerpt: 

**"I have experienced motivation towards a number of career paths that light up my mind like a Christmas tree, each for a few days at a time. But the lights fade away quickly and I find myself in a space where I’m questioning the feasibility of the chosen career path due to one reason or another. Then I go veering off again in some other direction altogether.** 

**Earlier, this had been a slow process, invested as I was in degrees and jobs. But now, the whole cycle completes itself in a matter of days. I’ve gone from aspirations of living as a teacher to a counsellor to a playwright to a poet to a librarian to an experimental psychologist to a mental health start-up owner to a data scientist and beyond during these short but intense highs. It’s tiring, how they all seem plausible in that moment and then fade away quickly, leaving me back at square one."**

Full Post:

“Keep Walking.” - Johnny Walker

What looked, for the longest time, like youthful inconsistency, turned out to be an aspect of my diagnosis as possessing traits of borderline personality disorder - an unstable sense of self.

Long story short, invisible monsters seize me from within, making me ride charged, ephemeral, ecstatic highs about any given career path that last for anything from one morning to a few days and then send me, inevitably, tumbling down the path of self-doubt after, followed by my abandoning the path altogether, very quickly; and this has repeated now, time after dizzying time, for decades on end.

Wait. Let me try, to follow Lewis Carroll’s timeless wisdom, to begin at the beginning.

I embarked on the path of biotechnology aged 17, with lofty goals of serving humanity, of alleviating pain, through research and innovation. I thought the path of research was also most suited to me, given my social anxiety. However, the subjects I was studying soon failed to interest me. Lost in a haze of indifference, I was soon in the final year of college. To top it off, the career prospects for a biotechnologist in my country at the time were bleak.

Upon encouragement from a friend, most likely modelled after her own ambitions, and infused with fresh hope and much monetary ambition, I hence started preparing for entrance into an MBA programme - a line of work which anyone who knew me, particularly with my conspicuous social anxiety, would have been able to see I was ill-fitted for. I was blind to that aspect of things. Perhaps I was too young to lose hope. So I got ambitious nevertheless: if so many people could do it and earn handsome packages thereafter, why not me - was my question, was my approach, was the depth of my thought process.

I prodded happily on through the MBA entrance coaching process. I was supremely motivated. I tried my very best to crack the entrance examinations into a set of elite, state-run colleges in the country. I had always wanted to be part of a premier educational institution, it seemed to me. I succeeded.

I was soon walking in, head held high, into a campus of geniuses that quickly saw me tumble headlong into a sense of intellectual inadequacy and self-doubt, coupled with my long-time companions, depression and social anxiety, barely able to keep up with the demands of the academically rigorous MBA programme. Simultaneously, disillusioned with the idea of the corporate, I couldn’t see meaning in anything I was studying or training myself to work as. Miraculously, though, I got through my MBA unscathed.

The corporate experience was soon to follow. Two days into the job, I crashed from anxiety. With constant calls to friends and medication for support, I got through 8 months of work - crashing, crashing, crashing - anxious, underperforming, and terrified on the job. I was thrown out, in the end, due to issues of absenteeism. After one more short stint - also marked by depression and anxiety - from where absenteeism once again made sure I got thrown out, I left my career in management for good. 

I was going to get married. I went home for a few months, got married, and took a break from work. I tried volunteering with NGOs, I tried foreign languages, the usual suspects. Nothing really worked out. Years passed. But my aspiration to make something of myself never left me.

In April 2016, my partner suggested I take up writing; content writing for businesses, in particular. And I tried it - and stuck to it, albeit as a sometimes unholy dance between freelance and full-time work. Four years passed - by far the longest time I’d been able to stick to a career path.

But my ambition began to kick in again - content writing for businesses wasn’t challenging enough, I began to feel. I could make more money, I once again thought, driven by the confidence of having stuck to content writing for a while. 

So I tried to take my content writing career to the ‘next level’ by trying to work as a content strategist, and failed miserably, thanks mostly to my social anxiety. I ran away from that job - with a sigh of relief - in a few months’ time. 

I took up content writing once again; from home this time, to manage the social anxiety better. However, this soon grew too monotonous and unsatisfying. I couldn’t do it for one more day, I thought. And on an impulse, I quit that, too. This was in October 2019.

Since then, I have experienced motivation towards a number of career paths that light up my mind like a Christmas tree, each for a few days at a time. But the lights fade away quickly and I find myself in a space where I’m questioning the feasibility of the chosen career path due to one reason or another. Then I go veering off again in some other direction altogether. 

Earlier, this had been a slower process, invested as I was in degrees and jobs. But now, the whole cycle completes itself in a matter of days. I’ve gone from aspirations of living as a teacher to a counsellor to a playwright to a poet to a librarian to an experimental psychologist to a mental health start-up owner to a data scientist and beyond during these short but intense highs. It’s tiring, how they all seem plausible in that moment and then fade away quickly, leaving me back at square one. 

Now, I am trying to work as a freelance writer. I think this has a few merits over my previous plans. This broad line of work, for one, preserves a lot of my freedom and hence moulds itself to fit my frequent, emotional-high-infused changes in direction. Two, writing is something I have been able to produce consistently in the past.

With these as my current consolations, I must move on. I must keep walking. I must keep writing.