Although the San Diego State University summer session doesn’t officially close until the 15th of this month, I got all my remaining coursework done earlier this week. Another pair of A’s locked in for the transcript, and the start of a very brief respite ahead of the Fall 2025 semester. As autumn looms, the looming circumstantial pressures are causing me a fair deal of worry and anxiety. On top of the upcoming 16 unit course load, it’s also become highly imperative to find a new income source.
In the face of these adversities, the unhelpful specter of comparison has also been invading my thinking. Be it my own peers or even younger adults of a different generational cohort that are thriving professionally and/or financially, it drives a painful poignancy of how far behind I am from my envisioned actualized self; a double whammy of negative self-perception, inadequacy in relation to others as much as my own personal standards. Left unchecked, that line of thinking devolves into lamentations over my personal history that lead up to this present existence. Specifically, all those prime years in my 20s and early 30s lost to reorienting myself mentally and emotionally after all collective trauma my younger self endured, all while the world at large has continued to spiral out of control.
In the monomyth of my life story, this is my Apotheosis stage, all preparation for the more difficult part that is the road ahead. In the context of everything before, it’s tragically comical to think that has all been the “easy” part of this life.
In the down time between job search efforts, I’ve been focused on doing all the little things needed to bridge that gap between my lived reality and idealized perception. I’ve been actively drafting personal essays, journaling, working out, and making updates to the website—I got a color scheme defined, the beginnings of an actual landing page laid out, and have been getting reacquainted with the relevant web technology principles. Pushing these type of milestone updates again feels like a good start, but as always, there’s still so much more to do.
