Sarah Morgan
Twenty years ago today, I was lost and confused. My first full-time job out of school was spectacular in many ways, but it’s hard to describe how at sea I felt at that point in my life.
My growing-up years hadn’t been simple. At the end of college, I had the opportunity to study abroad and I can’t overstate how that changed my life. But then I was done with school, I had a mountain of debt, and while I was very lucky to have a very good job, I felt like the sense of belonging and happy adventure that I had found in college was gone. It felt like Dorothy waking back up to black and white after briefly having had a world of color.
I never thought about this before, but: What the hell? Dorothy doesn’t get sad about that? Yes, her aunt and uncle and farmhands are there and they love her… but she’s back to the grey dusty world and she doesn’t miss anything she learned was out there in the world? That used to be one of my favorite movies when I was little, but I think maybe it’s just stopped being one.
Because I definitely felt like I was in a dusty grey world without a nice helpful yellow brick road and buddies to walk with on that path. I bounced between isolating myself in my sadness, asking for help in flounderingly awkward ways that angered and alienated old friends, and acting and looking bewilderingly fine for someone who was then sometimes so sad.
Not that I don’t still do that bouncing. But I think the waves get less dramatic as you age. Or perhaps you just learn how to sail. At the time, though, it felt like I was out on a pool raft in a perfect storm.
And in the midst of that, I started a blog. Not because I saw it as an important act. Just because if there’s any throughline to my life, it’s writing. Journals in an eight-year-old’s wobbly hand. Pages of passed notes, and then mailed letters. Emails, long, long emails, long before there were texts. It’s probably not a coincidence that I made some of my dearest friends online, back when that was an embarrassing and vaguely seedy admission. I process by writing. It only makes sense that it’s where I’d find connection and meaning. And, it turned out, a career. Twenty years ago, none of that occurred to me in starting a blog. I just wanted to make a fun new thing to play with.
By the way, if you’d like to see previous anniversary posts, Eight, Nine, Eleven, Twelve, Fifteen, and Sixteen are here, amidst an archive of thousands of other posts. I don’t think I’ve ever removed a single post. Twenty years of my thoughts. It’s like you get to flip through my baby pictures, except possibly even more revealing and embarrassing.
Some people have tidy, straight, stepwise career paths. From what I’ve seen, they’re rare. My own path has been more about following opportunities and gut instincts; about busting my ass when I couldn’t even quite articulate why it mattered; about beating my head against doors that wouldn’t open; about saying no to things that sensible people would have said yes to.
I’d love to say it was about trusting the journey, but that would be an absolute lie.
It’s been about trying, very hard, to trust the journey.
It’s about the journey being absolutely worth that trust.
