Will I Ever Find My Way Back... To Myself?

I slowed my pace from a jog to a walk and turned to head out of Golden Gate Park. As I exited onto 8th Avenue and Fulton, my legs quivered and nausea rose up in my throat. Placing a hand on my hip, I leaned over to let the blood rush to my head, trying to stop myself from throwing up.

When I looked up from the gray cement, I could feel that I was blinking back tears.

Why did I feel like this? Sure, I’d taken a break from running a while back due to an injury, but that had ended and I’d completed six-mile runs since then. Of course, with winter hours, it’d been hard to fit a run in before it got dark out. And I hadn’t gone before work either. BUT I’d always biked home from my office thirty minutes away. Was it really possible that I was this out of shape?? I hadn’t even run two miles before feeling sick…

As I blinked in the sunlight (so alarming at this time of year yet so amazingly rejuvenating), I let out a deep breath and allowed the tears to slide down my cheeks.  

It wasn’t really about the run. I’d be okay if I had to find a cardio alternative. It was about the fact that I’d lost myself so completely over the last year; that starting over, rediscovering who I was, wasn’t going to be easy.

It had been seven full days since I’d officially left my previous job. The past year and four months had taught me a lot and I did not regret the fact that I had chosen to work in PR nor that I’d been in the interior design industry. Still, there was no denying the fact that I’d allowed myself to get wrapped up in the uglier side of this world.

Now, I could feel (literally and metaphorically) the fog that had formed over me from working in an industry that basically went against every core value that I had. An industry that I couldn’t connect with no matter how hard I tried.

I was sluggish, both physically and mentally. Even writing this blog post was like wading through molasses, slow and sticky. Still, I knew I needed to push through. I needed to break out of the dark funk that I’d wrapped myself in over the past year and to find the light, find out what made me tick.

It’s strange because I thought figuring out what I was interested in doing and what I wanted out of my life would be self-explanatory, simple and straightforward. But it’s not. It has taken a lot of experimentation, thoughtful reasoning, and painful truth-seeking and I still haven’t even scratched the surface.

Still, there have been baby steps. Now that I’m unemployed, it’s been easy to feel desperate and to want to apply for any and all jobs that relate to my past experience. But, after trying desperately to write a cover letter for a social media strategist position, I finally had to admit to myself that I hated social media management. I hated the way clients looked at Instagram as the be-all, end-all. I hated the lack of inventiveness that social media managers were allowed. Even though this is a large part of my resume and I am interested in the way it ties into content marketing as a whole (and am in fact excited about strategizing from that point of view), the solo position of Social Media Strategist was one that filled me with sick dread. I had to accept that and though it may seem silly, accepting that fact was hard.

I also began looking directly into companies that I was interested in and realized that when it came down to it, the companies and fields that I thought would appeal to me didn’t. That was extremely terrifying.

I’m still not 100% sure what it is that makes me go, my ikigai, but I have slowly begun to realize what I am drawn to. Health, nutrition, fitness, and sustainability. These are topics that I look forward to learning about, writing about, and sharing. In what capacity? I’m not sure.

I know that there are many more uncomfortable jogs in my future and both surprising and not-so-surprising discoveries about who I am as a person, friend, cat-lover, and career woman. It’s a very small light at the end of my tunnel, but I’m going to continue walking toward it.