Quite a lot has changed in my life since I last posted on here. A few weeks ago, I was reluctantly preparing for my move to Austria and had accepted that I’d likely feel anxious and homesick, like I did in Switzerland. The day after my trip to the Austrian embassy in London, I started to question whether it was really worth the potential damage to my mental health to go through all the stress of moving to another country again. As exciting as it could have been, I concluded that it wasn’t worth it. I told one of my teachers from Lancaster and she said she still thought I should go, since it could be better than Switzerland, and I might fail my third year if I didn’t. It would be pretty difficult for me to enjoy Austria even less than Switzerland, but I didn’t have it in me to find out; I’m trying to get to a better place mentally and I don’t think there’s a world where moving abroad again will help with that. I couldn’t access mental health support whilst abroad because of insurance reasons, so I also fear that if I did struggle in Austria, I’d feel like I was on my own.
I applied for exceptional circumstances and I’ve been told my options are that I either switch to a degree in only French, or that I go to a German-speaking country in September. If I did the latter option, it would add another year to my degree and I would still end up having to go eventually, hence I’m likely going to choose the former. I’m glad that I can still carry on with a language degree but it is a bit sad to have learned German for so long and it won’t even count towards my degree. I still have questions about what exactly a single-honours degree will entail for me. I have made peace with the idea of it, though, because I know there’s still options. I can continue to learn German in my own time and I’d hope that my German knowledge is still a professional asset. I’m not even 100% sure that you need to do a Bachelor’s degree in the language to do a Master’s in Translation, so it’s definitely something I need to do more research into. The situation has made me question what it is I truly want to do in the future, which is why the classic quarter-life crisis has reared its ugly head.
My first thought was “Oh, maybe languages aren’t what I want to pursue because translation jobs will eventually get taken over by AI anyway” which then begged the question of if not languages, then what? I like the idea of journalism as a career, but I know that that isn’t easy to get into. When I was younger, I wanted to be a makeup artist so I also looked into that. I have so many ideas of what I want to do but it’s hard to commit to one. I just wish that someone could tell me which one is the ‘right’ path. This isn’t the first time I’ve said this on here, but I feel like Esther from the Bell Jar, only this time with the famous fig tree quote: “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. … I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.”
One of the reasons it’s getting to me is because people have constantly had high expectations of me. I’ve always excelled academically which meant I was often told by family and teachers that “you can do anything you put your mind to”. It feels disappointing to admit that a few months in Geneva caused me to come off the tracks of what I thought would be a relatively smooth-sailing degree into a comfortable career. I think that situations like mine are actually more common than one would think; I did some reading about ‘gifted kid syndrome’, the exhaustion that formerly gifted children experience because of the pressure to always be the ‘smart one’. It leads to them having perfectionist and people-pleasing tendencies, as well as tying their self-worth to their academic abilities. After reading a few articles about it, I realised that it resonated with me a lot; I was unaware that I do tie a lot of my self-worth to my intelligence.
In my article about my goals for 2025, I wrote that I had the intention of working on my self-love. I’m slowly getting there because I’ve been trying to put less pressure on myself to have everything figured out. But, the revelation has taught me that I need to remember that I have inherent self-worth, no matter my academic achievements, how I look, or any other superficial qualities. I know that it isn’t something you can easily rewire your brain to believe, but I know I will. I have a mental health assessment next month where they’ll hopefully advise me on next steps. I’m also starting a new job next week to gain experience before I start my final year of uni in October. My future still feels very uncertain right now, but as I said, I’m not putting pressure on myself to know everything. My favourite affirmation at the moment is “I don’t need to fix everything today, I can just change one thing and see how it goes”, which is the philosophy I’m adopting. There’s still a lot I need to worry about, but if I take it one step at a time, I will get to where I need to be.
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