It’s been five years since I graduated college. I’m a very different person than I was then.
My degree is in Economics, and I’ve reflected, during the professional pivots I’ve made over those past five years, on how I use it in this new creative storytelling career I’m building.
I don’t use calculus (thank God, I could barely use it in college), or mathematical models, or big datasets in expansive, overwhelming Excel spreadsheets anymore. I don’t do anything anymore with data visualization or market optimization.
I’ve entertained the thought of whether it would have been more practical—Boomers, cover your ears for this next part, it’ll upset you—to have majored in English, given that the bulk of my day-to-day career now is in the trenches of storytelling and writing and communicating.
No.
Aside from teaching me how to think and how to understand and use data, how to apply an intersectional and critical lens to the world, I’ve always described my Economics degree as having taught me one thing: how to make decisions.
In utility maximization problems in an Econ class—if you don’t know what they are, consider yourself lucky—you need to observe and understand the circumstances you’re in, lay out what your potential options are, weigh the potential costs and benefits of each option, think clearly, and pick one.
Even though the problems I had to apply that to in college were hypotheticals, that decision-making process and mindset has been the most resolute and invaluable takeaway for me from those Econ classes.
I’ve had to make a lot of hard decisions in those past five years since I graduated.
One day recently, while I was eating lunch, I had a strange thought hit me: What if I hadn’t decided to leave my toxic and exploitative job in Atlanta in December 2019? Or decide to move to Chattanooga? What if I had still been in that position throughout the entire pandemic? What would that have looked like?
It would have been disastrous.
I was already burnt out, undervalued, overworked, living hand-to-mouth every month, in an apartment that was falling apart, in a city where I didn’t have any friends and where I didn’t feel at home.
The pandemic would have just magnified and intensified all the things about that situation that were crippling me.
I would’ve kept “hustling,” taking on more work than I could handle (and that I didn’t really like doing) for a paycheck that barely allowed me to live.
I would’ve become even more of the cheap college student labor that my boss and colleagues saw me as, because I didn’t have kids that were home from school like everyone else, so they could dump more work on to me to “pick up the slack” and “be a team player.”
I would’ve been forced into the catch-22 of working with clients who didn’t particularly adhere to nor believe in masking or social distancing or vaccine mandates, yet I needed them to accept me and trust me in order to keep me on the account (so I could afford rent), so I would have had to decide between risking upsetting them and my place on the account by wearing a mask or risk getting and spreading COVID by not wearing a mask.
The loneliness I felt in Atlanta the months before I left for Chattanooga would have only gotten exponentially worse, which I think would have reached a dangerous point after a while.
I would have kept performing, not had the time or space to go on a personal growth journey, to find my true authentic self, to heal past traumas and learn how to have healthier relationships.
It would have destroyed me.
Instead, I made a decision to transition out of that job and build a creative audio agency, even though I didn’t quite have all the answers about what was going to come next.
A few months later, I made a decision to leave Atlanta in the middle of one of the worst parts of the pandemic for a city where I hardly knew anyone and didn’t know if I’d ever feel comfortable or accepted there.
Then, I made a decision to go on this personal growth journey, to commit to myself and to building a life that was for me and that I wanted and enjoyed. Part of that personal growth journey has been having to make tough decisions to set boundaries and cut people out of my life who were not health for me.
And a few months ago, I made a decision to transition to being a freelance writer, editor, audio storyteller, and communications consultant, even though I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to make a living doing that in the middle of the pandemic.
All of those decisions opened up the doorway for me to be where I am now: happy, authentic, healing, creative, passionate, dedicated, flourishing in a place I call home with friends who enrich my life and support me.
I wouldn’t be where I am today without each of those decisions. But none of those decisions would have possible without that first one, deciding to leave my job. And I wouldn’t have been at that point had I not decided to move to Atlanta after graduating. And that wouldn’t have been an option had I not made the decision to go to Dickinson.
On and on and on. Everything builds on what came before.
Each of those decisions was terrifying, though. It’s intimidating and paralyzing to take a leap where you can’t see what the full vision is for what comes next.
Economists call that incomplete information. No one ever has complete information. No one ever has it all figured out. You need to get comfortable with that and still be able to think clearly and make good decisions. That’s what I learned from my Economics degree.
In college, I learned how to make decisions, what you hope are good decisions.
In the past five years since graduating, I’ve learned how to trust in the decisions that I make.
“The future is fluid. Each act, each decision, and each development creates new possibilities and eliminates others. The future is ours to direct.” - Jacque Fresco