Picture This.

Dec 1, 2019
4 min read

Picture this: you get into your car, turn the key in the ignition, and start to drive. You’re heading to a location that you’re not very familiar with, but one that you’d, like, google mapped before leaving the house. Maybe you’ve even driven past it on the bus once on the way to school when you were a kid. You did your research, and you were convinced it was where you needed to go. You make it a block, maybe two and feel...confident, yeah! You know the way. As you drive, you start to let the lull of the radio warm you up, make you believe that you’re headed in the right direction. You round another corner, take another turn in the direction that you are sure is correct. You drive for a while before you hit a set of lights. You stop as they turn red and as you wait, you look around; at the trees that line the street, and the houses facing towards you, and the people walking through the intersection and all at once your stomach starts to sink -

This is not the way. You are lost. But you keep driving because, eventually, you have to end up where you intend to be, right? Plus, you've already been driving for like, 6 weeks, you can't just throw all that time and commitment away. Maybe you think about pulling over, checking your phone to see where you are, maybe you call your mom and ask her to tell you where you were the last time you were on track,

The last time you were happy. And she’ll tell you. She’ll tell you that you’ve taken a wrong turn, should’ve stayed on 3rd Street, just gone a few blocks further. You know that she wanted to tell you this before you made the decision to drive, but she didn’t want to sway you. And even though you don’t want to admit it, to yourself or anyone else, you have to turn around. You have to head home, take a breath, and start from scratch. You shake your head as you crack the window and crank the steering wheel and tell yourself that you knew in your gut that this wasn’t the right way but you had to try it, *just in case* it was. It all seemed so good at the beginning, it felt like it was the right choice, the right way. The road was so smooth, the pay was so good. You beat yourself up a bit and, eventually, you get back to the main road. Back to the familiar streets with the houses that you know and the trees that you know and the handsome, so-happy-to-see-you dog sitting in the window of the little green house that you know. It took you a little longer than anticipated, and when you walk in the door, late, jobless, some of them roll their eyes at you, comment on how young you are and how it ‘must be nice to be able to just take the wrong roads whenever you feel like it’, that it ‘won’t be like that forever'. They’ll remind you that you’ll ‘never move up in this world if you can’t learn to read a map’. And you just smile. Because you're 25 and you took a wrong turn, big deal.

And, of course, we're not actually talking about driving here, we're talking about my terribly misguided decision to take a "grown up" desk-job completely out of my field and think that I wouldn't end up wanting to pluck my eyeballs out every single moment of every single work day 🙃 you live and you learn.

At the beginning of October, I was done. I was crying on the airplane on the way to training, I was crying in the morning on my walk to work, I was crying in line at Starbucks because...I was clearly just very emotionally unstable in general... Everything felt wrong and I was feeling SO STUCK. As my mother would say, I put "all of my eggs into one basket" and was really counting on this job to work out, and now that it wasn't, I didn't know what I was going to do. I tossed back and forth between sucking it up and just doing it because it was a job, and calling it quits with the hopes that someone, anyone else would hire me. Finally, after nearly eight weeks, I bit the bullet and quit on the spot.

Now, lucky for me, I have the *most* incredible partner who supported me in my decision to NOT continue working a job that was sucking my soul, even though I had no immediate backup plan (add another gold star to Phil's "best boyfriend ever" card, maybe even two). And these weeks since quitting have been...interesting. I applied to a zillion jobs, had about a zillion interviews, received a good handful of offers, and then...decided to ditch all of that to go back to school.

In January.

In Victoria.

To become a Certified Holistic Doula.

*pop the champagne, y'all, I'm coming hoooooooome!!*

And, needless to say - I'm definitely not 100000% sure this is going to all pan out exactly as I'm dreaming it will, but what I've learned throughout this whole process is that, when you're excited about something, and you do it with the intention of positively impacting others instead of only affecting yourself, other people will want you to succeed. And they want to help you, and support you in making it happen. If it weren't for all of my amazing friends and mentors and like, complete strangers who took the time to listen to my ideas, or give me resources, or offer to let me sleep in their bed for free while I'm in school (shoutout to the Fracksonator) this just simply would not be happening.

So, in 5 short weeks, this long-lost Dillon will be back on the island with her student hat on, ready to jump into the world of birth support. Which feels like a much more obvious fit for me than insurance, amiright?!