I forgot about the second thoughts.
They always come, but somehow I always forget about them.
I get so busy hurtling in a blind panic towards anything anything anything that once something starts to solidify, another sort of panic sets in. What if I chose too quickly? What if there’s something better out there and I panicked myself into accepting something that isn’t what I want at all?
I currently -- finally -- have a job offer. Sort of. I think. I had a job interview by Skype just a few days ago. Nights. A few nights ago. Due to the time difference. It was morning for him, night for me. Night isn’t really my best time of day, but I still felt as if it went well. Most of our correspondence seems to indicate they’re going to offer me a job.
So now all my thoughts go flooding toward why accepting this job would be a Bad Idea: It doesn’t pay enough. It isn’t the sort of job I really want. I have to be on-call, again, after twenty years of not having to be on-call.
FOMO, right? That’s what the kids are calling it these days? Fear of Missing Out. I blame the internet. Today a query on a veterinary social media page mentioned another company that’s hiring. I found their job posting on another web page. The job looks good. It looks better than the job I haven’t yet been offered. Fewer hours. No on-call duty. A supervisory role which takes me partly out of the path of client interactions.
But is it better? It’s in the city, for one thing, while the job I haven’t yet been offered is in a small town nestled up against the border of the largest national park in Wales. The town was listed as one of the best places to live in the UK and boasts a restaurant listed as one of the UK’s top twenty in a recent Guardian article. Admittedly I’m not moving there to eat out every night, but I am moving there to try to live amongst people who would want to have a good restaurant on their local high street. Meanwhile the other job’s city takes my resident friend forty-five minutes to commute three miles into work each day.
The point is, I have no way of knowing which is “better,” if such a thing can even be said. Yet, still, just as something -- anything -- is about to be decided, I hesitate. I waver. I doubt. I sometimes threaten to backpedal and undermine the entire thing.
Fear, I guess. And completely natural, I know. But it would be nice if I could cross off even one item without continually glancing in the rearview mirror afterward.
