A Strange and Mostly Terrible Ten Years

[nathanielbuildsatesseract]

Five years ago today, I wrote A Unusual Anniversary to Celebrate, which was my five-year reflection on the day I realized I wanted to kill myself, and almost did. Another half-decade has passed, so I think it's time to revisit the story.

This day in 2014, I was mostly too overwhelmed to even go through the effort of trying to scrape back points on failed exams to make the F less humiliating. It was clear by this point that I wasn't going to cruise into the exciting astronautical engineering career I'd envisioned in high school, deluded by advisory hand-waving about the Silver Tsunami and teachers who actually put effort into their art. I wanted to give up, to quit trying to climb a cliff-face far beyond my abilities, and reorient myself somewhere, anywhere else.

This day in 2019, I felt mostly hopeless, clinging to the possibility that throwing myself back into the academic meat grinder might just finally pay off. I'd managed to get a degree, but I was unemployed and entirely dependent on my parents, the exact situation I'd envisioned five years prior, just with a bit more student debt than I had in 2014. (The absolute magnitude was much lower than I'd imagined, to be fair, though that only because my parents paid more of the tuition up-front.) I'd spent almost an entire year applying to aerospace engineering jobs and getting barely a nibble in return.

Today, I got up and went to my job designing human spacecraft.

I'm still a long way from what I wanted for adult life, but I have to acknowledge that my career is finally going in a good direction. It was a miserably and unnecessarily drawn-out process, but I'm doing more-or-less the sort of work that I set out to do. I've been through a lot of bad things that in a more rational society I wouldn't have had to go through, or at least would have been less likely to. The fruit in many areas isn't so much low-hanging as already fallen directly onto the picnic table and waiting to be picked up and eaten. Maybe in a few years I'll finally be in a position to help people notice all that.

That afternoon in Armstrong Hall, I couldn't possibly have predicted how the coming decade would play out. I suppose I'll just have to wait and see what joys and suffering the coming decade will bring for me.