Letting Go of Past Lives

Stepping off the path my younger self had created for me.

When I was 23, like many 23-year-olds, I had the world figured out. Or at least I thought I did.

Coming out of college, I had a plan: work for a couple years, go to graduate school, and then find a position in academia. I didn’t yet know whether that meant becoming a professor or an administrator, but I loved the environment of higher education, and felt like I had found my home.

Spoiler alert: this plan did not work out.

Instead, about two years ago, I entered the tech industry. I didn’t intend to “sell out,” which I’m sure my 23-year-old self would accuse me of doing. After a long job search, I found that I had to accept that my chosen field just wasn’t that into me — at least, not the me that I’d become in the decade since I made my grand life plan — and figure out how to move on.

After getting my foot in the door at 23, I worked for nine years at the same college, grateful for stability during a time of economic turmoil. I bloomed where I was planted, negotiating for promotions and using my job as a base to pursue the shifting dreams of my 20s: building my skills as an editor, traveling, and buying a house.

What about that grad school dream? I settled on going to my local state school part-time to earn an MBA, because it was a flexible and relatively affordable option. That, I’m pretty sure, is where everything went sideways for my grand life plan.

Earning an MBA — even from a school that offers classes on liberal business causes célèbres like social entrepreneurship, “green” value chain development, and B Corporations — shifts your worldview. Maybe that’s especially true if, for example, you’ve come to the program with an undergraduate history degree and a love of words. The degree helped make me more assertive in conversation and more critical in my quantitative analyses, and it provided a confidence boost by giving me exposure to areas of the workplace — finance, accounting, strategic planning — that I didn’t see in my day job.

What I did see was that my stable college job was no longer great. I negotiated a new position and a pay bump, and took that as a sign my plan to stay in academia was working. But I also started applying for new positions, with my dedication to my job or my job search vacillating from month to month.

Then one day, it became blindingly apparent to me that this balance was no longer tenable. I was given an ultimatum: leave, or stay in a position that would be a career dead end. Fine, so I couldn’t make it work at my current place of employment. That didn’t mean I had to give up on my plan entirely. It was time for some aggressive job hunting, networking…the whole nine yards.

The turning point came unexpectedly, when I ran into a former classmate from my graduate program. I mentioned to her that I was looking for new work, and she said her firm was hiring. At first I dismissed the opportunity. It was not a job I would have considered six months prior, or six years prior. My 23-year-old self, who is still in my head, judging me, would have laughed at the proposition outright.

After a couple days of consideration, though, I changed my mind—probably because of an off-the-cuff comment I’d heard during my MBA program. A fellow student, a mid-career guy whom I respected a lot, once mused to me, “Early in your career, sometimes you just have to move on. Because after a couple years, you’re not the person you were when you started the job. And it can be hard for others to see that.”

I believe what he said is true. It’s hard for others to see how you’ve changed, and it’s hard to see change in yourself. After a couple years of job searching, I had to accept that maybe I wasn’t having success because the plan I built as a 23 year-old was a plan for a different person.

So I jumped out of the stability of the career I’d pursued and into an uncertain future. I found a world where people talked my language, got my references, and valued my skills. After years of fighting to stay on a path that fought me back, it was a relief to not do so anymore.

I don’t have a new plan for the — not “new,” let’s call it “evolved” — me figured out yet. I don’t know when I will, which is hard, as a natural planner. For now, I hope that I’ll remember these lessons from my past experience, and let the person I become in the future take the lead on the choices she faces.

Deanna Oothoudt does marketing work and triathlons in the Pacific Northwest.

This story is part of The Billfold’s Change Series.

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