FoMO

Apparently I'm way behind on trending topics in the digital world because today was the first I remember hearing of FoMO - the Fear of Missing Opportunities. As described to me this morning (which could've been taken straight out of a description of how I feel about my life) it's the feeling you get that you're in a great room with many doors leading off it. Behind each door is a different opportunity and experience, you simply have to go through the door. But you're standing there in the center of the room afraid to make the wrong choice. Instead you make no choice. 

This has been my biggest hurdle in getting out of unemployment. After my initial period of self disdain I should've been able to get back up and get back to work, but I swilled around in my pool of self pity and continued to let myself get beat down every time I submitted an application and heard nothing back. Then, after a time I finally started some soul searching to try and find out what type of job I should be looking for, or what type of continuing education I might want to get into. What would I be good at? What do I like to do? What causes do I care about? What jobs would be rewarding? I've come up with a long list. 

Then, just as I'm getting excited about a couple things, my FoMO sets in and I freeze. There are just too many things that I think I would like to do, and I don't want to go down the wrong path and waste precious years of my life. I want to jump on the right track and for everything to be perfect. What if I just get a job as an administrative assistant and two years from now I'm just in the same place I am now, but older? I could've been doing something else in that time that could've furthered my aims in life. I could've/should've/would've something else. But instead I didn't for fear of missing out. 

And I wish I could say I was writing this from a place of clarity where I've overcome my FoMO, but even though I'm starting work and pursuing a wide range of things that may take my life in interesting directions I still feel that sense of "what if this is the wrong thing, what if there's something better I could be doing?". What I have come to terms with though is that I can't simply sit by and wait to figure everything out; primarily because I can't afford to sit around, and secondly because time keeps marching on whether I'm moving forward or not. So, I'm choosing to move forward.