Too Fast
I feel like my life is starting to pick up and it's a bit overwhelming for me.
Things were pretty slow when I graduated college in May of 2025. Aside from being introduced to a whole new community of people about a week later by chance, not much was going on in my life. Wake up, apply to jobs, game until late at night/early in the morning, sleep, repeat. This cycle was broken up occasionally by hangouts and events with my new friends and community, but it basically was how the rest of 2025 ended up for me. It was an undesirable cycle, but it was slow.
Now I'm back into education, learning an interesting subject (Machining/CNC Machining/Advanced Manufacturing) and I am quite enjoying it, but my life feels like it's moving much faster than before and I'm stumbling a lot. I've been reflecting a lot now that I've gotten busier and sometimes I feel "out of breath". My life is a lot more eventful now, which is a good thing, and even though I have no say in it, I don't think I'm ready.
A lot of that feeling of not being ready comes from my insecurities about my ability to properly live.
Some of my friends are barely older than me, but it feels like they have a lot of their lives figured out. I spent most of my first year out of college on my ass and jobless. Granted, the job market is not in a great place currently, especially for marketing positions, but applying to 400+ places with little to no responses back is demoralizing as hell. Here I am now pursuing further education in a trade for the hopes of getting employment, but it doesn't make me feel good. I'm terrified.
I'm worried that even if I go through the entire class and pass, that it will all have been for nothing. This is an opportunity I only have one shot at and if I fail, it would destroy me completely. I don't even feel like I can make mistakes during this program because I always attribute my own mistakes as failures, and it hurts every single time. I don't even remember when I started feeling that way about mistakes, but its become so ingrained in me that it's not easy for me to not correlate my mistakes as complete failures. I have to do everything right the first time because there's no guarantee I get a second chance.
Thinking about all of it just overloads my brain and overwhelms me. I've been doing well so far, but that's what worries me the most: Doing well at the start before everything falls apart at the end. I'm trying my best, but I constantly fear that my best will never be enough.