Decision to go post grad

This essay was supposed to be a piece of writing about my jobless daily life. It would be worth describing how is a life without any compulsory rules by others; how arbitrary my days are with my indecisive mind. For example, I wore the same red comfy sweater for a week in a row because no one out of my family cared about my wearing and asked me a silly question about whether I slept outside. Or, I realized every day how useless the lists of my schedule planned by myself were. They were literally invalid because I could have put them off depending on my mood. Most of the time my mood was to procrastinate and lie down in bed next to my study table. It felt full of liberation especially right after quitting the job that made me suffer from my boss's micromanaging. I lingered over until my guilty gauge goes high enough to motivate me. What else, I became spending more time with my mom. Whenever I had three meals a day with mom, helping her try a new recipe of Yak-sik(Korean-style's sticky rice) in the kitchen and accompanying her to church or markets, mom said "a daughter is the best!" These self-sufficient events were unusual when I worked. Maybe I had been too work-oriented, pursuing nothing but an excellent laborer. Perhaps such enjoyable freedom as described was outweighed by my architectural ambition.

It becomes almost a decade since I achieved my bachelor's degree. After I began my career in the architectural industry, although jumped ship a few times, I was employed somewhere. There was seldom a break between jobs. I guess this was attributable to two reasons: a desire to draw my career path; inertia in my current state out of a vague fear of being jobless. Considering my volatile mind, I was pretty lucky to engage with fabulous tasks that allowed me to stick to them until completing my missions. It was not tedium that drove me into another work but because I found new opportunities at the next moves to leap out of the related difficulties I struggled to seek behind the wall. Naturally, such curiosity hardly allowed me to have a break. Soon, however, it turned out to be less probable to dig my interests continually in the way I earned my living.

At this point, I came to think about an option: going to grad school. It was time to choose whether to delegate specific fields to others or narrow down my expertise to make a reinforcement. If I was intrigued by particular themes amongst design fields: automation or drawing details, it was obviously of negligence as a practitioner who had no choice but to accomplish assigned tasks as an all-rounder. Despite my architect license, I thought myself untrained in certain areas such as space management, the protocol for construction permission, comprehensive knowledge of building codes, and so on. I heard these additional skills would be clearly obtained as I cling to architecture firms for a couple of years and become a manager. In other words, after I continue my work here for more years and experience what I have missed, I could smoothly be a common coordinator, who thinks oneself knowing everything, which possibly is temporal and shallow knowledge. On the other hand, I could choose to be an expert; digging deeper; leaving behind my back what I had zero interest in. This was why I gave it a shot to go post-grad. I have always doubted my ability to study further. Nevertheless, as a dreamer, I would like to experience a world of possibility and outstanding.

After quitting my job and completing my preparation for grad school at the end of 2022, I am having anxious days this new year about discovering errors in applications, about my short-period plan before what turns to my next move, and about my insecure future. There is nothing much I could control this anxiety. All I do is add more distractions to my routines including swimming in the morning, learning subjects through books, strolling before a nap, knitting a bag, or expressing my gratitude to those who were willing to help me during the last intensive preparation. I hope they would help brace me to defeat negative thoughts. On the bright side, such a period of mine is a rare opportunity full of hope and new advantages. Despite no more thrill of enjoying freedom in the daytime while others are at work, (I even became to think that not going to work is as boring as going to work) I came to realize how valuable time I spent now, which I had longed for last ten years. Time to be sensible.