Hi all, I'm a 26 year old gay man who is looking for some advice about the future. This year I decided to quit a job I had been in for about two years. This decision was based around my urge for a new challenge and a different lifestyle. This job was in a lively student town, but being in full-time employment and a fairly introverted person, I struggled to make friends. Most of the time I felt quite lonely and would often go back to my hometown at the weekends to be with my family and friends there. However, there were some great positives too: I started a language course which I really enjoyed and also made a few good friends. So it was quite a mixed experience. After I quit this job, I decided to join a challenging job that would provide me with a life-long profession. I was also thinking of moving to Spain to work as a teacher there, but I finally decided to take the programme due to the future prospects that it would give me. This was a tough decision to make and I worried about it a lot at the time. Unfortunately, having been in the programme for around 4-5 months I found the work and the working environment to be too challenging. I was regularly putting in 75+ hour weeks, working around the clock, not eating or sleeping properly and generally becoming very stressed. The trouble was that my employers were not able to provide me with more support, so I started to feel very down and my confidence has been knocked. Having reviewed my situation, I decided a few weeks ago that I would leave this job. Some of the other people who were working with me also decided to leave due to the job pressures and stresses. I do now feel like I have let a lot of people down, but I also realise that I did the right thing for myself and my employers were very understanding. So, having finished now (just before Christmas), I will be moving back home with my parents. I'm happy to be out of the situation I have been in, but I'm also anxious: I'm not sure what kind of job or career I would like. I know that I want to continue working with children (which was the focus of the job), but I also know that I need the work to be less pressured. I also know that I need to start putting more effort into my friendships and getting myself out there and meeting more people. It sounds strange, but I feel as though I'm in a race and everyone else is way ahead of me in their lives now. In any case and on a positive note, my recent job has given me lots of new skills and experiences that I can take forwards. Does anyone have any advice with how I can go about planning my next move in life? Thank you so much for reading this.
From what you describe, it sounds as if you've been floating around a lot - I don't mean casually, but in the sense that you're not really tied in any way to a particular place or group of people. This can bring its own kind of positives, of course, but it also brings a few negatives, as you're no doubt realizing. One way or another, I think it's going to take some time for you to come to terms with what exactly went wrong with your previous jobs and what you need for the future. You mention that you've already identified a few areas that you'd like to improve in your life - job path with less pressure, more effort in friendships/social life, and so on. I would think more about these sorts of things - what are the key areas you want to focus on for the foreseeable future? The more you can point to those, the easier it might be to figure out where to plant your feet (literally and figuratively). Job wise, it's hard to say - you could stumble on something one week from now or several months from now, it could be in your prior fields and just a better organization or something completely different. So, not to run counter to the above, but you could decide on a path and follow that, but also allow yourself room to explore and try out opportunities you hadn't necessarily planned on. Hope that's not too vague! Feel free to get in touch if you want to talk more.
