Last month, after over 3 years, I ended a freelancer's contract with a startup from Berlin, Germany. After conversation in this team and mutual agreement, I left to grow in the direction that interested me the most: user experience.
After my last commit at my old job, I left to Polish seaside for my one week holiday. Even though I promised myself not to think or talk about my work, each time I'd caught my own thoughts, I realized I was looking with hope and joyful expectation into my future.
Mostly because, to be honest, I wanted to try new things for long, long time and there used to be never enough time and power to either learn or try out the learnt. I don't know about you, but after working with layouts for 7 hours I want to go out and give some rest to my eyes and body and I'd rather not spend another hours designing or working at my computer. No fancy coffee shop can help with that.
So my holidays past and I returned home expecting to rush on this brand new career freeway with all of my hopes, desires and potential. How big was my surprise, when I realized, I don't know what to do at most of the time. Even though I've just completed splendid conference for user experience design newbies, I was helpless to set goals and achieve them.
It's been already 3 weeks after I came back from holidays. During this time I experienced great and scary variety of states and emotions. I doubt myself, I blamed myself, I spent hours staring into the void trying to fetch the next step out of it. And many more. I was afraid of my future, our future since I engaged during my vacation. I lost faith in my potential, creativity and intelligence. Yeah, everything was in pieces.
But I wanted to gain control. I looked closely to my thoughts and tried to identify these default mode commentaries in my head, that were helding me back from doing what I dreamt about. Today, I feel maybe 10% more confident than I did 3 weeks ago. But it's enough to move forward. Oh, I actually should've said that first: it all started by doing what was urgent even though it felt so against myself (like signing up to university). Dealing with this uncomfortable friction was, I believe, necessary to get over my fearful head.
I hope you didn't expect to get a recipe by the end of this blog post. I the last guy, who would write so. But I hope we can connect. I hope,we can establish our common conciousnes that breaking free is glossy, tempting but comes at a great effort, sacrifice and demands challenging many inner demons, which would like to keep us where we are.
That's it for now, but I think I will be back on this topic. So, until next week.