It’s somewhat of a introspective time of year, maybe fuelled by the endless grey clouds and rain we’ve been having here in the UK. It sort of sends you inwards, when there’s not much changing outside. I feel as though something is ending and something else is waiting to start, but I’m not too sure what. Coming to the end of my studies, my mind is on the future, some sort of gainful employment maybe, at least some sort of way to make a living that’s fulfilling, fun and interesting.

I’ve been looking back at the cycles in my life over these last 4 decades, and it all seems a little like start and dead end. Re-start and another dead end. Switch and start and dead end again. I’ve felt myself viewing my working life as a series of endless failures over the years, even looking at myself as an endless failure. I couldn’t work out why I couldn’t follow the perfect progression of those around me.

I couldn’t stick with one job, one trajectory. I admit, being in my 40’s now and looking at careers of those around me, there’s some regret that I didn’t ‘stick it out’ in one of those jobs I hated, follow the promotion trail. I sometimes find it hard comparing myself to others, feeling I should be a head of something, a director of something else, a manager of somewhere by now. But I left everything I started. Over the last few years though, I have recognised some kind of pattern. I’ve found in these pattern there are clues. And in these clues are answers. And in answers, there is positivity.

With each of those inevitable, wry aftershocks that come with late-diagnosed neurodiversity, a few more crusty layers fall away, revealing a kind of tentative truth underneath. A hint of gold shining in the rubble. It just takes a bit of digging.

Everything reaches an end, where somehow, I have to change. I’ve felt like it’s just a dead end over and over, to be honest. Why couldn’t I stick with one thing? But I’ve started to realise, dead ends are my phoenix.

I start, and then after a while, it is time to end. Looking at it with the knowledge I have now, of course it works like this. I feel now like it couldn’t work any other way. There’s quite a bit of comfort in that. Having an explanation is the first step of a new plan, I feel. This plan also sounds like a challenge. And that is fun in itself…

After a few years doing something the same, every day, the dopamine runs out, the fun is over, the achievement is achieved. I have been ‘good enough’. The chapter closes, and a new one begins. My brain wants to break free and follow excitement. So is the way. Small cycles, and longer ones. They run concurrently, always looping, always starting and ending.

Society values predictability, stable linear trajectories. When you show up with a CV with a good chunk of semi-successful-but-not-quite jobs listed, with no coherent thread of promotions running through it, it’s met with a grimace and offers to tailor it into something more palatable. I saw myself as a failure that kept hitting a brick wall. But of course I did.

I straighten up a little and look back with clear eyes. I fought and fought and pushed myself past the natural end of everything I ever did. I got burnt out, I got ill, I got depressed. I couldn’t understand why I was so good and then suddenly, I wasn’t. Everything has ended in some sort of burnout and I couldn’t see why. I thought I just wasn’t cut out for success, as I defined it then.

But, and I whisper it, because it is still a new revelation and kind of precious, I can suddenly see it. I got bored. The dopamine ran out. For me, it truly explains why I’ve gone down in flames so many times. Pushing to stay consistent when every part of my brain has given up and just wants difference, excitement and novelty. High stress, low reward, no freedom, many rules, rigid time, hardly any praise. Monotony. No opportunity for ideas or creation. The surefire, 100% successful ingredients for burnout. Of course!

The slog to the top isn’t interesting to me. The reward at the end of a long, long task? I just don’t care. Is the thing I’m doing fun? Then I’ll be amazing at it. As soon as it stops being fun, or challenging, or interesting – I’m right out. It could be a billion pound job at the end of it and nothing on earth would get me there. It could be a career trajectory to be the strategic director of actual Earth, but if there wasn’t a fun path to getting there, I’d say see you later mate. I think I’m making peace with that.

I’m motivated by praise, problem solving, new things, connections. Things where I can win, things where I achieved, where I want to push myself and have freedom to put new ideas in place, to create things, to just do stuff fast. It’s true, praise lights up my dopamine connections like nothing else. I love stuff that is challenging, and finding a way through the challenge and feeling like I’ve won. I love interesting things. I can jump about between unrelated tasks endlessly and get them done incredibly well in record time, if there’s a bit of panic, chaos and freedom attached. Little cycles, within bigger ones.

As for the bigger ones, the ones that stretch over years, well. They come to an end, too, if there is not enough variety, not enough incentive, not enough freedom to stretch out and go full galaxy brain. It’s ok. For me, it’s natural. It’s inevitable. I think of the environments I worked in previously, and that ‘aha’ moment is almost delicious.

So, 7 years into my foray into academia, I’m feeling a little apprehensive. A year before I hand in my thesis, I’m running on fumes and spite like most final year doctoral students, determined to try and finish one damn thing in my life, but slightly worried about what comes next. Do I want to fit myself into that academic structure? Just how much room is there to create something that is sustainably interesting? Is there a trajectory with enough momentum and space to keep me going? Is there glory on tap?

I would love to carry on learning, discovering, researching. The freedom of academia is something I’ve never seen in any other job, yet at the same time the entrenchment of structure is deep and very resistant to change. But there has been space to spin an entire dinner service of plates, follow research rabbit holes, push myself to do more than I ever thought. I’ve actually thrived here.

If I choose to try and carry on, at least my eyes are open to how my brain thrives – and I know that if the cycle ends, it is a natural end, and not because I have failed. Having compassion for all those past endings gives me strength to face the possibility potential of a new one, and the courage to change things that aren’t working to things that do. A recent conversation described it as lily-pad working. Hopping happily from lily to lily, all within a pond. I love that.

So I know if it doesn’t work out, I can make peace with thriving non-linearly, and hop and shimmy sideways into whatever else is on the horizon, head over heels.