Yes, Seek Validation

You need to know you’re on the right path

For some, their life paths are straight. If you can retire after thirty years of pretty much doing the same thing, that’s darn straight. But my path has been like a branch on an old tree, with Y-shaped intersections every so often where a life-changing decision had to be made. No matter what your decision-making process, (I wrote about this recently), you should be open to validating whether or not you made the right choice.

I moved to Honolulu as a single mom to go to graduate school. There were so many reasons why this was a bad decision, a risky one. I didn’t have a job, didn’t have much financial aid, and I was responsible for a second-grader. It was not easy, things did not flow at first. I put one step in front of the other, getting through one problem after the other, and wondered if I had done the right thing.

But I do remember a moment of clarity, amidst all the bumps in the road as I was attempting to obtain a sense of normalcy in this move. I was walking down the quad in the first few days of my arrival at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. There was a man walking towards me and as we got closer, we recognized each other. I had known him years before when we both worked at the local paper — he was a reporter and I was a copy editor. He and his wife had moved to go to grad school a year before. He told me…