Where Do I go From Here?

Where do I go from here?  What am I doing with my life?  What will my life look like after my Peace Corps service?  I am only a few months away from finishing my service in Ethiopia and I have asking myself these questions among others recently.  In some ways, I actually joined Peace Corps because I wasn’t completely sure what I wanted to do with my life right after graduating for college.  It’s strange that two and a half years later and four months away from finishing my Peace Corps service, and I am still trying to figure that out. 

Sometimes, volunteers decide to extend their service and do one additional year of service.  Some volunteers do this because they want to prolong that time and hope that that additional year will help and give them the time they need to figure all of this out.  For me though, I don’t necessarily feel that one additional year in Ethiopia would actually help me.  I am at a point in my service where I feel like I have done as much as I can possibly do and that I would be able to better figure out what to do with the rest of my life back in the states.

I do know this though:  I really do want to go into the health field and I do enjoy working with people on a one-on-one basis (or individual basis).  I am currently in the process of applying to nursing and public health graduate programs.  Soon, I will also start looking into potential job opportunities as well.  In some ways, this is a difficult process because the Internet can be very limited and/or slow here in Ethiopia…. Which makes it difficult to do research and work on applications.   In some ways, this is why I am not extending my service at all.  I feel that even if one more year in Ethiopia were to help me have a better idea of what I wanted to do, Internet would still be a challenge to deal with.

To be honest, I have no way of knowing what my life will look like after my service is over.  Yes, I am working on graduate school applications and doing job research.  But will I be going to graduate school or working right after service?  If the answer is graduate school, then will it be nursing and/or public health?  And where will I go to graduate school?  If I find a job, what kind of job will it be and where will it be located?  Despite all that I am currently doing, there are still so many unknowns.  In some ways it is scary, but at the same way it’s really exciting.

Honestly, I am okay with as many unknowns as there are because I am still in the process of working on myself as a persona and really discovering who I am.  As a good friend of mine pointed out to me the other day, I still have four months in Ethiopia to figure do as much of that as I possibly can.  That is partly why I joined Peace Corps.  As I have gotten closer and closer to the end of my service, I have forgotten this.  I almost forgot that I still have some time before I leave Ethiopia to do as much as I can in regards to working on myself.  In forgetting this, I was almost ready to give up and settle with how I currently am.  But I was extremely grateful for that reminder that I should not settle just to settle, that there is always time for growth and discovery.

Despite the unknowns that are still a large part of my future, I should be only excited.  No matter where I am in my life, I should always continue to work on making myself better and aiming to making sure I am happy with who I am and with how my life is.