Shock of the New

I’ve been looking into online degrees for the past week. New, old territory. Scary stuff.

The going to school isn’t really the scary part. I can handle that, and I’ve always intended, since the day I graduated college, to return to school. I will get my Masters, before I die. The two I’ve narrowed it down to are AIG (American Intercontinental University) Online and The University of Phoenix Online. Both offer Undergraduate degrees in Visual Communication, in the specific areas I’m interested in. My plan is to get the basic groundwork in the undergrad degree, and then advance beyond that to a Masters, through my next employer. If anyone has any recommendations of one over the other, I’m all ears. I’m looking at starting with one or the other in July. So the clock is ticking.

But that’s the interesting part, the challenging part, the, let’s face it, the fun part of all this. It’s not the scary part.

The scary part is money, the single thing that’s been scary for me since I left my former position, to focus on improving my skills, abilities and marketability in the first place. Going back to school is hard enough. Doing it while working to support a family is insane. But that’s what I’m doing. I’m looking hard for freelance work, and have a few nibbles that will make life reasonable for the short term. In addition, my wife will be adding support to our family financially in addition to her continuing role as main caregiver to our two boys. We’ll both be working twice as hard, for half as much. I’m also looking hard at scholarships, fellowships, and grants in the short term. But it is a full time job looking for jobs, improving ones skills, getting an education and searching for scholarships all at the same time.

Given my competing priorities over the next several weeks, my blog entries here will be necessarily short. I want to savor the fun part, the interesting part, the challenging part. But I’ve got to get over the scary part first.

I remember a movie I saw a while ago, Holy Man starring Eddie Murphy and Jeff Goldblum. Maybe I’ve mentioned it here, before. The message it had sticks with me to this day, though—maybe especially these days. The message was about not letting fear hold you back. That letting go of fear being the greatest freedom there is.

Fear is a self-imposed mechanism, created to prevent us from doing something stupid, from petting a lion or touching fire. But as highly evolved creatures, we also have a highly developed sense of fear. We are afraid to disappoint our peers. We are afraid to be revealed as frauds. We are afraid of a dozen, dozen different things that we have no reason to be afraid of, have no reason even to consider, and which consequently and constantly hold us back. So we compromise, and stick with the status quo, and settle, and conform. We "go along to get along," and to avoid that panicy feeling one gets in the pit of ones stomach that says “Uhh…a little outside the level of comfort, here… danger, danger Will Robinson.” That’s a feeling I’ve been cultivating lately, for some ungodly reason. That’s the feeling that’s been driving me.

But just acknowledging this isn’t enough to get past the fear. Being honest, I’m living with it every day. But I’m also backing it up with the certainty that I’m heading someplace better. And maybe that’s the scariest part—that I know exactly what I’m doing; with a keen awareness of what I could gain, but also what I’m risking to get there. And I’m doing it anyway.