Starting over is hard at any point in your life, but especially at 40. I had some regrets about my choices at university. Insert English degree joke here.
I pursued an English degree so that I could teach Victorian literature. I even moved from my small town to North Texas to enroll in grad school to begin this transition only to change my mind. I felt burnt out from academia after just graduating with a BA, and I felt that I needed to be out in the working world. I worked as a file clerk at the corporate office of a major beauty supply chain making $19.00 an hour. I was happy to be working, though, and it was a foot in the door for a professional career.
Professional at what exactly? That’s hard to pinpoint when looking back at early-twenties Mysti. I didn’t have a career goal in mind; I only wanted to be able to afford a place to live and have food in the fridge. I had graduated university, having been on the Dean’s List every year, and leaving school with a decent GPA. I guess I was tired of having to prove myself worthy of something bigger.
But when I would look back at early-twenties Mysti I would be disappointed. Maybe I should have majored in something ‘better.’ I had high school friends who were speech pathologists, dental assistants, computer scientists, and paralegals. I was the introvert who read domestic novels by spinsters and spent time writing papers explaining that yes, lots of events occur in Jane Austen’s novels and here’s why these novels were important.
My hours of reading and analytical writing led me to discover that I loved scrutinizing text…of all kinds. Manuals, essays, emails, blog posts. Any sort of content I found was proofread with a mental red pen so I could point out errors and reconstruct a sentence in a more concise way. I did this for years after forgoing grad school. Then it clicked.
I should be a technical writer. But where do I begin? It wasn’t part of my curriculum back in school, and while I’m interested in tech for personal use, I never held a tech role in any of my jobs.
So, I put this idea on hold for a while.
But putting off this idea led to years of productive procrastination. I’m calling it this because I moved from job to job and gained new skills in office administration. Along the way, I worked with different platforms like SharePoint, Google and Microsoft Office Suites, medical claims processing software, and SAP (to name a few). Little did I know that I could apply my experience as a user to writing documentation. So I finally signed up for an online course to learn the basics of technical writing and to finally get certification.
And the course material went over my head.
Most of the introductory courses were full of jargon I wasn’t familiar with and full of software I was supposed to know (spoiler: I didn’t). This put me off the course for a while and I was stuck thinking that this wasted money and time. No way was anything that I put into this class going to come back to me in a good way.
Then early-twenties Mysti popped into my head, and I came to a realization.
The reason why I never set a career goal wasn’t because I didn’t have the drive or motivation.
It was because I was afraid of being a professional failure.
Which shouldn’t make sense because I have failed before…many times!
And what happened after those failures? Well, I was just fine. I learned from my mistakes and I made better choices. I picked myself back up and continued working in whatever field I was working in at that time.
Even after all my experience of trying in the workplace and failing from time to time, I was still afraid of failing.
But I had proven myself stronger than failure, hadn’t I? And I was okay. If I failed at this one thing that I was determined to finish, I would still be okay.
I logged back into the certification course and dedicated my spare hours in the evening to completing the curriculum. Two months have passed and I am now at the stage where I am building a portfolio along with a final capstone project to submit when I take the exam.
Do I now understand everything in the course? Heck no! Am I still afraid of what could happen? Heck yes!
But I know that I will be fine, regardless of the outcome.
The new trajectory I’m taking will need time and patience if I want to reap the rewards of my efforts, even though it took nearly a decade to take the plunge.
I’m glad I have an English degree and I still love Victorian literature, but now I’m discovering new documentation for my mental red pen to scrutinize. I see billboards and trucks with their business logos and wonder what sort of docs are on their sites. I learn about software and immediately go to their LinkedIn page and website and scour the FAQs and Knowledge Bases.
It feels liberating starting over at 40, to set a new mindset for a goal I only ever dreamed of. I have resolved to shift out of my old routines in order to continue my education in this ever-expanding technical world.
It’s in my power to create this path and I need to put past regrets behind me before they become road-blocks.
Mysti Gayle 
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