New Year, New Goals, New Me?

When the new year started, I began with a slight advantage over those who were wracking their brains to figure out their new year's resolutions. I had to write mine down to graduate Johns Hopkins University.

Part of the capstone project was writing - and submitting for peer review/peer pressure - what my writing and career goals would be the next year. Under the assumption that I had graduated with a master's degree in science writing under my belt, I tried to start off my list like I imagined my classmates would: rushing to museums, banks, medical offices, the news, and so on to fill that chair and start making money.

But in December of 2025? And starting in 2026, job prospects weren't looking so good. And I was a mess of emotions: anxious, a tad depressed, hopeful, and just wanting to focus on the family I was with during winter break. I had a gig as a teacher - thank God! - but I wanted to do more. I wanted to utilize this education that I paid thousands for. And I was feeling the pressure.

After all, I had gone down this academic journey with the wide, innocent eyes that everything media and books have taught me: the traditional life dictates that I finish high school, get my bachelor's, get my master's, then a career, and then the money to live in a place of my own and do whatever I want from there, uber successful with money, partner, pets, and kids. Get a Nobel prize in something, or get my name put down in history. Make my parents proud. Maybe I'll mimic them and get a second master's degree, getting the bragging rights there; it was all about how easy the life down the road would be, once I got that career. How successful I was going to be. How big my prospects were, just like on TV.

Well, I entered Whitman College in 2019, and we all know what happened after that. Tradition thrown out the window, and I was floundering. For a couple years, I just watched as my traditional future got put in a trashcan and set aflame. I thought maybe I would crawl back to stability if I went and got my master's degree, but it's not stopping me from getting job application rejections.

So, that capstone project. Finish my master's thesis, write a summary of who I am and why I went into this program, write a book review for one of the assigned books in class, write and send a pitch to a magazine for a story, and lay out my next year's plan for success. No biggie.

My advantage in this class was that I'd worked on my master's thesis during the summer, so I had time to read a book, edit/revise my thesis, interview people, and still spend time with family and sleep. And I chose what turned out to be a really good, helpful book: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. I could write a review about that book later, but all I can say is it changed my perspective on my prospects.

While I was still feeling depressed, anxious, hopeless, and a whole bunch of other things in my daily life, I also felt the need to stand true to my talents, my knowledge, and my worth. So I rewrote that writing/career plan, deleting most, if not all, of that hopeful garbage that I knew I should strive for but I'll never reach. It wasn't my plan. It wasn't me - not in the here and now, and I could never imagine it being me in the future.

Then I lay out my bare feelings, with the disclaimer that I was an anxious mess with no idea what the future around me as an American citizen would look like. Then I lay down my bare minimum.

It was simple stuff, I suppose. Write 50k words a year to prove to myself I can substantiate a novel, send a pitch letter every month to one magazine for an essay in my thesis or a new one I'd write up in that month, and just work on improving myself very slow but steady. Join a writer's group, network myself. Focus on getting a science writing-oriented job. You know, the simple things in life. I thought if I could just hit that - the bare minimum - then I could push myself to do more.

January was tough for me. Beginning of February was that same difficulty, just with the added stress of knowing a month into the year is gone and the country is still on fire. I still have gigs as a teacher, and I really enjoy teaching kids, figuring out how to work with them to get the material to really sink in and help them, and - let's be honest - the income, even if it's meager. It's still money coming in, and I'm so grateful for it. And turns out I have a natural talent as a teacher. I shouldn't be surprised, considering my master's degree. But hey, sometimes I'm oblivious to the obvious.

Job rejections still pour in my email, new jobs line up on LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter and Indeed that I apply for and never get, and I feel the need to move closer to my cousins and sister in a state on the East Coast. Still, I trudge along, trying to do the bare minimum for myself.

I'm glad for my support network. Definitely a thing I'll bring up at Thanksgiving.

It really does help that I got my ADHD brain medicated mid-February of this year. I'll write another post on just how that medication changes things, shifting possibilities into probabilities. But now I have my own website, my own domain, and my own blog site. I'm stepping into the internet as a writer, a blogger, a reviewer.

2026: a new year, new goals from my writing life and career plan, and a new me - a me that's medicated. Holy hell, I think I feel some hope.