What's Next For Me
Wikipedia defines “liminality” as “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.” To put simply, it’s the state of being between things.
That’s me right now; I’m between things. I’ve really taken the past few weeks off due to not feeling well, due to feeling that something is off. I’ve had a lot of time to think and contemplate. I’ve tried working on my projects, but I fall back into the same exhaustion every time. I can’t recall ever feeling this way – tired of the routine of my life, the unfulfillment of doing nothing, and the lack of ability to do anything, right now.
I’m between things. I graduated last December, spent time working on IrisCTF, spent my January and February working on “Hack the Planet!” and “Badger,” and then spent early March doing HackMerced VIII. I joined the job market shortly after HackMerced VIII, had a high hit rate, and started scoring interviews. I got an email from my old team at UC Merced IT Network asking me if I was available for a short-term project, to which I entertained and we met up and we’re working out the paperwork right now.
My next 3 months consist of moving, starting a new job, and getting a car. It also consists of anxiety, uncertainty, and a new phase of my life: the life after school. Pre-K to 12 and then college, now I’m out and I’m just left wondering what to do.
Until I start my new job, I have yet to secure financial stability. Until I move, I have yet to secure home stability. Yet, these are two things that I cannot expediate – one is going up and down the chains of bureaucracy and HR while the other is awaiting supply to increase. Two big parts of my life are in stasis, stagnant and unmoving. Here I sit in paralysis, unable to do anything.
For what feels like the first time in my life, I’m bored. I’m waiting, with nothing to do. I wish I could work on some projects, but the inability to secure my finances or residence in the meanwhile has paralyzed me with anxiety. My appetite to work is null and whenever I try to force myself to work on some projects, I find the same response: a gagging-like reflex, a headache in my head.
While my peers are still in school, worrying about exams and homework and projects, I’m sitting here just waiting for the next thing in my life to happen, suspended in liminality. There’s no longer a track; I have no thirteenth grade, no fifth year, no next exam or next class or next semester. I exist in the plane that is the world with no more guide rails to take me to my next destination. Like a pedestrian in the middle of the road, it feels like I exist outside the boundaries of what my world once was.
Only I can dictate where I go from here, and that power is freeing, but it’s also new and unknown and scary.
Happy trails.