You can always change your mind.

When I was a child

I wanted to be a zookeeper. I loved spiders and would toddle around the garden to collect them in my sand bucket, to be observed on the climbing frame. I was never afraid of them, unlike most of my friends and family. The way they walked, their distinct appearance, their webbed abodes, it was all fascinating to me. I read books on dinosaurs, creatures of the past, and watched animal shows (ROAR! By the BBC was a particular favourite). I was a cub scout, always outside roaming, enjoying kayaking and adventure sports at any summer camp.

So how did I end up an office worker?

Well, life is full of many twists and turns that may take you in a direction you never expected. You’ll have to make choices, hard ones, and ones which sometimes will take you away from what you want.

But, just as it may twist away, it may also turn back.

You can always change your mind, but be warned, the grass isn’t always greener. Picture a garden. Your garden, or someone else’s one from a film or book. Importantly, when you picture it, you know that it belongs to you. No one else, just you. As time passes, seasons change, as do you, and so does your garden. Sometimes it will flourish, be radiant of life, and everything is great. You love your garden, it’s just how you want it. But, inevitably in life, what goes up must come down. Your garden will wilt sometimes, weeds will pop up, the dog jumps on the flowers, rain turns it into a mud bath… You get the idea. Hopefully these mishaps won’t happen all at once (but don’t worry, there’s another note for that). When your garden is a mud bath or weed heaven, when it doesn’t look or feel as great as it once did, you might find yourself looking at next door's. Your neighbours are patioed. There’s no mud. The grass is literally greener (or at least you think so ). You might think: ‘Wow. That looks good’ or ‘That looks way easier to manage’. You might look at other gardens online too, places you could move to with different gardens. None of these are wrong. It’s okay to look at your options, to see what other people are doing, to even try some of it out. What I suggest is doing your research...

There are lots of options to choose from, and these aren’t the only ones, but ones I’m familiar with:

A. Wait it out

B. Invest in your garden

C. Copy another garden

D. Change your garden completely

I’m aware the use of gardens to represent life, and the choices you make, may be a tad confusing. So please allow me to go into one of my own big choices.

What have I Done?

On my first day of starting a new univesrity course, I sat down in the lecture hall, looked around me at the mass of students and thought:

‘What the f*** am I doing here?’

Giving every decision you make a chance is important, but so is trusting your gut.

If you’ve gone down a path that turns out to not be what you thought it would be, or your feelings about it have changed, that’s okay. It’s not a one-way street. Although you can’t go back to exactly where you were, as time travel is yet to be invented, you can do a U-turn, a sidestep, or even put the brakes on.

This doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you tried.

Ask anyone with an element of experimentation in their career, a scientist, a baker, and they will have had mistrials. It wasn’t a failure, it just didn’t go as planned. Importantly, try to understand why. For a baker, was the ratio wrong? Was it underbaked, overbaked, sat on? I know a professional naval chef who left sugar out of the gingerbread, who left chicken out of the chicken curry. It doesn’t mean she’s a bad chef, she’s a fantastic talented person, but she made a mistake. In these scenarios, it was pretty obvious what went wrong, and the learning curve may have been to simply pay more attention (or not be hungover when cooking). For situations in your life, whether it be career based, love interests, hobbies, take a cool off period and assess.

Like me, you end up on a course which you suddenly realise is not what you want. I felt quickly, in my gut, that my feelings may have changed. But, as with any change in life, an adjustment period can smooth over any creases. So that’s what I did. I had just moved away from family, finished a whole chapter studying something else, and was now entering a completely different sector. It was hardly surprising I felt uneasy, homesick, and was questioning my choices. So, I gave it a term. Four months to figure out if this was still what I wanted. I set some goals for that time:

• To get to know people, as often it’s those around you that make a situation better.

• To give the situation a chance to prove my gut instincts wrong, going in with an open mind.

• To put my best self forward, and get a whole picture painted, to truly understand my options.

Those last two are pretty similar. The key difference is that the middle is focussing more on allowing the course to present itself to me, to open up, the last being about me seeking out answers. It’s possible to be proactive and still allow stuff to just happen. What will be, will be.

I did meet people, good and bad. Two lovely ladies were probably the main reason I stayed as long as I did. There was one tutor I enjoyed the lessons of too. But otherwise, the atmosphere was wrong. My expectations weren’t met, and when issues were raised, they weren’t resolved. The final nail in the coffin was the lack of support from peers and mentors. I won’t go into detail, as I’m not here to slag off the course or anyone involved. This is only my opinion, I know others felt the same, and some would disagree. In the end, it doesn’t matter how other people feel. It’s about how you feel.

So, for four months I attended, tested the water. Looking back, although glad I gave it the opportunity, I don’t think that long was needed. Despite this, staying hopeful, I deferred the course for one year to explore other options. That way, I was giving the situation the benefit of the doubt. This isn’t possible for everything, I know, as there are some choices that once they’re gone, they’re gone. But I’m a supporter that if the option is there to put something on pause, it’s worth doing. This way you can look at other factors. Like I mentioned, in my situation, it wasn’t just the course that was new. I had moved, my partner was studying, I had graduated, there were lots of changes and I knew that these may be affecting my views.

In the end, when the year of deferral came to an end, I had moved on and didn’t want to return. But knowing I had the choice was comforting.

I had changed my mind.

And have since then too. Tested more ideas, learnt more about myself, gotten into several pickles (not literally, I don’t love vinegar quite that much). It can be hard to bat away those voices and pressure all around. Society, people who love you, people who don’t. I remind myself that it’s my life, and sometimes advise can be helpful, but not always. Oddly enough, they could be wrong too. They don’t know what’s going on in my head, only I do. Just as, as much as I love you as your aunt, I realise there may be times when I don’t understand your decision. I’ll try my best, I promise, but I can’t promise I’ll get it every time. I can’t promise I’ll support you every time too. But I will try to understand and empathise.

Change is inevitable. The sooner you come to terms with that, the easier it can be to let go of the fear that surrounds it. Instead, hopefully, embracing what this means. If change is inevitable, you’re rarely truly stuck. It means anything bad, chances are, will pass. When I was going through a hard couple of years, moving 7 times, not having a job or hating what I had, when life threw curveballs, I kept repeating this:

It's not forever, it’s just for now.

And although I’m yet to use it for this reason, it could also help you stay grateful. If you have good fortune, a lovely life, which I hand on heart hope you do, by reminding yourself about the inevitability of change you may be that bit humbler and more grateful.