You did it all in the right order, and the diploma or the offer letter or the keys are exactly where they were supposed to be by now, and when somebody asks what you’re doing next, you give an answer that sounds far more decided than anything you actually feel.
What showed up alongside them was a sense of impending doom, and you can’t explain that to anybody, least of all to the people who are proud of you.
School spent years promising that this part would feel like an arrival, and that turns out to have been a promise nobody was in a position to make.
So you call someone a generation ahead of you to ask how they worked theirs out, and you learn they’re partway through a version of the same question decades later, which is not the reassurance you were after.
The leaving gets talked about and so does the arriving, and almost nothing gets said about the interval in between.
That’s where you are, with the old supports gone and the new ones not yet taken hold, being asked to make real decisions inside conditions you can’t read yet.
Whatever arrangement you had before all this, the one you’d take back tomorrow if anybody offered it, was comfortable, and it had stopped asking anything of you.
Nothing grows there.
That’s a description rather than a consolation, and the disorientation you’re carrying is simply what being outside that place costs, which is a different thing entirely from being someone who handles change badly.
Ask any of them what you should do, and you’ll have a confident answer inside a minute, usually from someone who loves you and would like this settled.
What clients tell us they value most here is how slow we are to problem-solve, and your confusion is treated as information about where you actually are.
The stretch where everything looks like it’s failing is the ordinary shape of being moved from one place to another, and knowing that doesn’t make it hurt less, though it does stop you filing it as evidence against yourself.
So we ask the big questions about this stretch of your life, we stay in the ambiguity with you rather than closing it early, and when words aren’t reaching it we’ll put the thing into a story, or onto paper, or into something you make.
What clients describe wanting, once the first panic about it settles, is a path with steady growth in it that isn’t asked to account for their entire life.
Work you enjoy, or work that pays the bills honestly, with no shame attached to either version of it.
Something close to the balance everybody keeps talking about, which we’d treat with the mild suspicion it deserves while taking completely seriously that you want it.
It all happens through a screen, from wherever in Texas you’ve landed, and amccraw@plantedtobloomcounseling.org reaches Alana directly.
A free consultation is somewhere to say the unfinished version of this out loud and hear what it sounds like outside your own head.
Whether you want company through this stretch is a real question, and you’re the only one holding the answer to it.
Something in your life is asking for attention, and you’re the one who noticed it.
That’s the courage part. We’ll bring the shovel.
Take a look around, and if we sound like the right fit, book a free 20-minute consultation.
Growth starts where you are, and right now that’s here.
You can also email us at amber@plantedtobloomcounseling.org.