The Next Step
Well, now what?
One year later and I’m out of massage school, full of new knowledge and skills, ready to quit the cubical world and forge a new path.
My evenings and nights are suddenly empty. I have free time again! But for the past week and a half I’ve been restless, shifting from studying for my board exams to making bracelets to taking walks without much focus. I didn’t immediately start writing again because I had forgotten that I have stories to tell and the capability to write more than one sentence per day. But I’ll work out the kinks and start writing more, dammit, because life started to get interesting again and there’s suddenly enough spare time in my day to record it.
Spare time. What a foreign concept. The feeling is similar to the end of senior year, when I worked and pushed myself harder than ever before and then suddenly, nothing. This year was more a matter of time consumption than intellect. Still, the principles are the same.
The point is, I need some hobbies. Some combination of amusement and physical activity and actual usefulness. Fitting neatly into these categories are my plans to dust off my video editing software, take a belly dancing class, and re-teach myself Spanish.
A part of me wants to start a revolution, but I know I’m far too lazy for that.
I also need to study for my board exams so that I can be a licensed, not just trained, massage therapist. Oh! and find a job. Always easier said than done, but hopefully with specialized skills this time around the job search won’t be quite as tedious as before. I’d like to work at a hospital or rehab clinic and ideally maybe one day work with kids in one of these settings. For now, though, I just want to start working.
Work with kids, give massages. Anyone could have predicted this by the time I was in high school – well, anyone except for me. I loved giving massages but never even imagined the possibility of wanting to do it professionally. I loved working with kids but knew that I didn’t want to work with them forever. No, I wanted to join the “real world” and use my school-built smarts to enact change on a global or at least a company-wide scale. As it turns out though, the real world doesn’t require much brain power, and even the smallest amount of change moves at a snail’s pace. Not quite what I was looking for.
So instead, I think I’ll stick to using my intuition and changing the world one body at a time.