My daughter received her GCSE results today.
She did remarkably well. Better than her old man ever did, in fact.
Watching her consider her next steps, and all the possibilities that seem to stretch out before a sixteen-year-old, I found myself thinking back to my own youth. Like many people of that age, I was trying to work out what to do with my life.
Or perhaps, if I’m being honest, I was trying to postpone working out what to do with my life.
University seemed a sensible choice at the time. It was what teachers recommended. It was what respectable society recommended. It was what one did if one was reasonably academic and had no clue what one actually wanted to do.
So off I went.
The assumption, never quite stated aloud, was that clarity would emerge later.
It didn’t.
That is not quite the same thing as saying I made the wrong decisions.
Looking back, most of the major choices I made seemed entirely reasonable at the time. Indeed, many were exactly the decisions that careers advisers, parents, employers, and the wider culture would have applauded.
The difficulty is that sensible decisions do not necessarily add up to the life you imagined.
For the first few decades of my life, there was another ingredient in the mix.
Having grown up in a fairly fundamentalist evangelical Protestant environment, I carried a strong sense that my life formed part of some larger story. Not as the hero, you understand. More as a supporting actor with a few lines and perhaps a minor but meaningful role in a cosmic drama.
There was a plan.
There was a purpose.
There was, if not a script, then at least a director who knew where the production was heading.
Or so I thought.
The collapse of that framework happened slowly and then rather quickly. It took years to unpack. What eventually brought the wheels off my grand plans was not one dramatic event but a perfect storm of circumstances: unresolved issues from childhood, marital difficulties, work stress, undiagnosed neuro-diversity, declining physical and mental health, and later a bruising encounter with workplace bullying.
By my late forties, I genuinely wondered whether I would ever do anything useful again.
Fortunately, I clawed my way back from that particular pit.
These days my work is useful. I help people. I contribute, in however small a way, to my local community. My jobs are generally not highly stressful, and I try to carry them out conscientiously.
There is dignity in that.
There is also a profound sadness.
Mind you, there are days when I suspect I am being rather ridiculous.
After all, I have a wife who has somehow tolerated me for many years, children of whom I am immensely proud, a roof over my head, food on the table, and meaningful work.
If I met a man with all those blessings who nevertheless spent a disproportionate amount of time brooding over his career trajectory, I would probably tell him to stop feeling sorry for himself and count them.
The awkward fact is that I am that man.
The strange thing is that both feelings are genuine.
I am grateful.
And I am resentful.
Content.
And disappointed.
Sometimes on the very same day.
I would be lying if I said I never wonder whether I have wasted some of my talents.
Is this really it?
Am I doing work that genuinely helps people while simultaneously wondering what became of the ambitions that occupied so much of my younger life?
Apparently so.
I sometimes wonder whether the lingering sadness comes from the career itself or from an inability to stop revisiting the scene of the accident.
There remains a stubborn little voice that insists that if I could only understand what happened, everything would finally click into place.
The career choices.
The ambitions.
The burnout.
The roads not taken.
The opportunities missed.
The opportunities taken.
All of it.
According to this voice, resolution is always just over the next hill. One more insight. One more moment of self-understanding.
Unfortunately, it has been making this claim for quite a long time now.
For reasons I won’t go into here, there are also one or two primal wounds and jagged edges knocking about in my personal inventory.
I suspect most people have them.
The awkward thing is that they have a habit of turning up in places you don’t expect. We imagine we are making rational decisions about careers and ambitions. Years later, we discover that some of those decisions may have been negotiated between our conscious minds and a collection of much older ghosts.
Or perhaps not.
At my age, one accumulates theories.
Watching my daughter contemplate her future today, I felt an odd mixture of pride and anxiety.
Pride because she has already demonstrated that she is considerably cleverer than her father, which admittedly is not an especially demanding achievement.
Anxiety because around the same age I also thought the future looked broadly understandable.
I hope life is kind to her.
I hope she makes good decisions.
Experience suggests that making good decisions and obtaining good outcomes are not quite the same thing.
Still, one has to start somewhere.
At sixteen I thought I was setting out on a carefully mapped journey.
At fifty-five, I’m increasingly convinced that most of us are making it up as we go along, carrying our blessings, our disappointments, and our jagged edges with us.
Some of those edges have become smoother over the years.
Some haven’t.
Hearth and Heart Magazine 
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