Beyond the Horizon

This is becoming quite the habit. Writing in September at the start of the academic year about how much I hate optometry and in February, take those words back and have some deeply profound revelation that makes me change tack and view it differently. STORY OF MY LIFE. No, but all joking aside, this blog has always been an honest reflection of my life so whilst my university-related posts have felt like a brutal cycle of ups and downs, they have catalogued how very much up-and-down it has felt. And so, it would be an injustice to not write this particular post.

A much happier version of myself (or so I like to think...?) - Contact lens clinics, 07.02.17

Optometry; bane of my life, destroyer of my sanity, inspiration of slightly depressing, if not outright miserable writing material. Yet now, when I say that I hate optometry, it almost feels like a lie. Almost. (I can literally hear the collective gasp of shock as that sentence sinks in). I would have begged for someone to tell me this last year. I wish I'd have known that if I were to fast-forward fourteen months, my perspective would have done a complete 180 with my feelings catapulting all the way to the other end of the spectrum. Then again, I'm not sure I'd have believed it. My first year - and to some extent, the first half of second year - was absolute hell. It was a torturous, mind-numbing sense of entrapment in which thinking about my future would fling me into a bottomless pit of despair. It wrecked my peace of mind, cracks and fissures criss-crossing madly and deepening until it disintegrated into nothing. It broke me.

Now - and this is so absurd that it nearly makes me laugh to say it - it is now something that I am entirely at peace with. I can't tell you the exact moment it changed; looking back, that moment when burning resentment melded into a soft acceptance blurs from memory, but I remember a prayer tainted with crushing desperation in the middle of the night and days turned into nights and back into days, and I was hit with the jolting realisation that everything felt right. I was no longer coming home and wishing my life was different, dragging myself out of bed at crazy hours in the morning to study for my degree no longer made me want to curl up into a ball and cry, thinking about my future no longer made me want to tear my hair out. It was like all the pieces were suddenly clicking into place and life felt good. Everything had changed. Everything. And I wish I could tell you what triggered it but the truth is, I don't even know. It just did.

The sharp awareness of that subtle shift from "hate" to "mildly like" i.e. "I am totally okay with life as an optometrist and I am going to embrace it and do my damned best at it", tripped me up faster than I could blink. It slammed home when someone asked me "do you enjoy the course or do you wish you were doing something else?" and when I was tapping out my reply, I thought "no". 
No, I do not wish I was doing something else. Because optometry is, a hundred percent, the perfect fit for me. Don't get me wrong, I don't love it (I mean, does anybody really?), heck, I don't even know if I like it, but it's good. It feels good and right and just...good. And beyond that, (fingers crossed) one day, I am going to be in the unbelievably lucky position to be practising as both a biochemist and an optometrist and I realise how wonderfully rare and amazing that is. Had you asked me last year if I were to do life differently, I would have said yes in a heartbeat, that optometry wouldn't even remotely feature in it. Ask me today and I say that I wouldn't do it differently if you came to me with a do-over in the palm of your hand.

Funny, how fast the human mind changes over time but more than that, how it can change with a little perspective. How some doors keep banging shut while others swing wide open and with it, the trajectory of our lives alters irretrievably and sometimes we are so blind to what we are being saved from, or being taken to. Once upon a time in this little writing space of mine, I said that our detours and heartbreaks always lead us to something so much better. That sometimes, what we want isn't necessarily what we need, or isn't meant to fall into place at that particular moment in time. But what's happening now, in the present, in the here and now, is exactly what is meant to happen and it is exactly where we are meant to be at this precise moment in our written fate.


Believe me, no one more than me can understand how horrible it feels to hate how life is turning out. Or how it feels like it's falling apart instead of falling into place. I have felt the latter for the better part of five years. And that is completely okay and normal. It's okay to not enjoy a degree you're studying, it's okay that you failed that exam and you're being set back a year, it's okay that your dream career is delayed by three years or even not transpiring at all. It's okay to feel all of that and you don't have to feel guilty for it. I felt guilty for the entire time I hated optometry - that I was privileged enough to be in my second degree while some people don't even have the privilege of an education and I had the nerve to want to drop out, made me feel like an awful human being at times. It took me so long to accept that I was entitled to feel like that and it didn't mean that I was ungrateful, but just unhappy. And so if, like me, you find yourself feeling trapped or unhappy with a life decision, acknowledge it - if you have the guts to do something about it, then do it and don't look back. Life's too short to not do what makes you happy.

But I will also say this - give it time. I tried to drop out of optometry - it was a very real decision that I considered and almost made - but here I am, halfway through my second degree, nearly at the finish line of my second year and it's because I faced obstacles that didn't allow me to drop out. Something always came in the way. That door that I kept trying to exit from, kept slamming back in my face. Trust me when I say that at any given moment in time, you are where you are meant to be. Wait for it. Wait for that moment where it clicks into place like it did for me, because believe me, it will. Little things are forever slotting into place for you and you don't even see it until one day, a close-up image of the bigger picture flashes into view and it makes sense like it never did before. I have waited and waited and waited for it to feel like my life is coming together. I can't tell you how often I have thought that maybe it never will, that I'll be hanging on to this thread of hope for an eternity. It seems almost miraculous that now, for the first time, I feel it. I feel like at least some of it - the parts that I had actually given up on -  are finally falling into place and all it took was a sincere prayer, a little bit of faith, and the common sense to stop focusing on the bad and instead, directing that energy in finding the good.


It blows my mind how much hidden wisdom you can stumble upon when you stop dwelling and spiralling on what's going wrong instead of what's going right, making that negative cloud of energy hanging over your head so much bigger than it needs to be. Count the blessings. Always count the blessings. You might surprise yourself; sometimes, a rose-tinted perspective of a life you maybe wouldn't have written for yourself, sets you on course for a life that is a hundred times more wonderful, fulfilling and infinitely more beautiful than anything you could have ever imagined.