Mah Few Char part 1

This blog has been a long time coming. I have approximately 5 months left of my thesis, and it's time to start organizing myself for post graduation. All of my friends at Tu Delft are super optimistic and passionate about their post graduate life - they're looking way ahead and deciding what path they want to travel. I'm a bit different. So far my tactic of walking through life by staring at my feet has worked ok - I've walked a pretty chaotic path, falling down slopes and rising up others, but at least I've never had to tilt my head up 90 degrees to look at the ominous horizon filled with question marks.

Tu Delft has been a crazy challenging and amazing experience for me. I've learned a lot of theoretical concepts and I've created a base of some really good friends here. I have no regrets whatsoever. But if I'm honest with myself, I think part of the reason I applied to Tu Delft 2 years ago was so that I could delay the choice of which door to open. Coming out of my crippling failure at AECOM, I could see many doors begin to close around me; one door was going back into the industry, another was entrepreneurship, and the last one was academia. In the end, I chose to keep the academia door ajar with my foot. 

Wow, I just realized my metaphors in this post are pretty detailed. I hope anyone reading this can understand what I'm talking about...

Where was I? Oh yeah, I'm leaving Delft soon. Even though I've had a blast here and have learned a lot, I still consider myself no more prepared for the industry than when I started. It's kinda like I'm a caterpillar that has cocooned itself for 2 years expecting to burst out as a beautiful butterfly, but in the end, I disappointingly ooze out as the same caterpillar.  

This problem is compounded with my current long distance relationship. It's been exactly 2 years and 2 days since I started dating Karen Algeo (you may know her by "Kafu" or "Kaz"). She's the first woman I can say I love, and it pains me that my style of living, which is essentially no different to a jellyfish being pushed along by the current, is going to cause some severe problems for her. She's anchored to Australia with 2 dogs, a lease, a job and a solid network of friends and family. Even though she has bravely said she'd move countries for me (and even surrender the dogs!!!!), I'm still scared. Even if we both find a job in some country somewhere, I'm still very concerned that I'll be either blatantly incompetent at my job or hate it in some way. From my past experiences, absorbing failure isn't easy, but it's always been manageable - I could simply move countries and start again. Now the stakes are higher. If I fail again, I'll be transferring all those problems to Kaz and replacing them with a whopping hit of guilt. So, what's the best way a jellyfish and an anchor can coexist? The most obvious answer is to move back to Australia and stay there for a while until I learn to life better.

Stay tuned! No doubt I'll be writing more about this in the months to come.