19 Nov “We All Make Choices, but in the End Our Choices Make Us.”

This evening I did nothing more than spread myself out all over the living room couch, half asleep  while I watched  a movie with my mom. I not only wanted to spend some time with her,  since we hardly see each other despite living under the same roof, but I wanted to keep my night pretty low key. For some reason, I went out on both Friday and Saturday night and am exhausted. I haven’t gone out twice in a row since I was in, maybe 3rd year university, yet, somehow I thought I could handle it.

Nope. Not at all. I definitely cannot.

Apparently my age is really getting to me…

Over the past few months, this whole “turning into an adult” thing has started to become extremely apparent. I’ve finished school, I’ve made some new friends entirely outside of my usual circle, and I am now wrestling with the decision on where my career is going to go next. Well, where my career is going to begin.

I’ve heard it said that the full time job you get right out school can often determine a large portion of your future career path, if not your career in it’s entirety. Your first real job is where you gain most of your professional experience and it’s where you become niched in a specific industry as the years go on. It’s a big decision, and weirdly enough, it’s even bigger for me because I have a few choices in front of me.

The scary thing about having choices is knowing there is that only one choice to be made, but also not knowing what may be given up in the decision. I could pick one job and hate it after realizing it’s not for me, or I could pick another job and realize the first job was the one I would have grown and succeeded with on much larger scale.

It’s also scary knowing that whatever I pick will also play a large part in shaping who I am; all of my decisions have. My decision on what school to get my undergraduate degree, my post graduate degree, my decision to join a sorority, to date certain guys, to make certain friends, and my decision to have ostomy surgery have all shaped the person I am today. Luckily, (well, I think…) my decisions so far have moulded me into a slightly intelligent and moderately tolerable woman.

So what if my next major life decision is the wrong one?

What if I pick the wrong job in the wrong industry for the wrong salary and the wrong time commitments with the wrong people? Will it turn me into an uptight (more so) bitter woman? Or will it turn me into a completely career crazed person with no desire for anything but work? Maybe it will help me grow and accomplish things I never thought possible. But what if I don’t pick a job that helps me grow at all and I end up just doing the same monotonous thing over and over again until I am completely drained of my will to live?

What if it actually turns me into a cat lady?

Ok- dramatic.

But this is scary.

Lately I’ve made some slightly less important, but still relevant decisions in other aspects of my life; practice, if you will. For example, over the past few months being back in Toronto I’ve really had a chance to see who of my old friends are real friend while getting rid of the ones who were not, as well as making new friends from completely different social scenes who I could see being a part of my life for a while.

Being single has also added another element of decision making into the mix. I’ve quite enjoyed the time to myself, since I’m pretty sure I haven’t been single this long since I was… 18. However, with making new friends, comes dating new people. While I am in no freaking way ready to get married or have little baby things, I still have to be cautious with these things.

I know that my decisions of who I decide to spend any of my time with will affect my future, even if it is just in the smallest of ways.

Tonight, my mom and I watched “The Adjustment Bureau,” which was a movie about an agency that controls the path of people’s lives. If one person didn’t follow the path, it would send ripples through their future forever. Maybe it was in my half-consciousness state of mind, but that concept totally freaked me out. One wrong move and BAM I have to live in a cardboard box under a bridge with only one  friend named Boozy Joe.

One small decision can change the path of your entire life.

It’s weird to look back at my life when I was sick and unable to make decisions for myself. I could barely keep my eyes open for an hour a day, let alone think of even close to the immediate future. Thankfully, my amazing mother and father made the big decisions for me at the time, and have helped get me to where I am today.

But that’s only gotten me this far. I have so much farther to go.

Now the decisions are up to me.