Indecision

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Tomorrow I go to see a counsellor at a community college. Not the local one, one more than an hour's drive away but I think this one will be better. There's a good uni 20 minutes drive from me but my grades aren't good enough to get into that. Tomorrow I have to tell her what I want to study but I feel like I can't decide.

I'm leaning towards IT. I enjoy computers and I just feel like I'd like to have a career that teaches me skills I can use outside of work. I figure if I'm good at computers at work I can be good at them when not at work. Also since I spend nearly all of time on a computer anyway then maybe working on one would be a comfortable thing for me to do.

I figure I should do a Certificate III in IT but then I think maybe I should do a Certificate III in electronics instead. Maybe that could give me skills I can use outside of work. But then I think maybe that sort of job would be too fiddly for me.

Then I think, maybe I should study to be a FIFO miner. They get paid a lot and they get one or two whole weeks off at at time. The same community college has mining courses but I feel like I know so little of that field. I don't know what I'd do in a mine, I don't know what I'd study before. I feel like I'd be leaping without looking first. At least with IT I have a vague idea about it. Sort of. Most of my experience with IT so far has been with recreational computing, not work computing. I'm not saying that makes me a computer expert, the complete opposite. I want to study IT not because I think I already know about computers but because I don't already know about computers. Otherwise I wouldn't need to study.

There's even a course for cable laying. They do that in mines. They do that in other places. Maybe I could do that. Or something else.

I keep on thinking of things I could do. I don't want to waste years studying the wrong thing. I've already wasted so much time in my life so I feel like I shouldn't waste anymore.

Maybe it's anxiety. I feel anxious that I'm going to make the wrong decisions in the future and I feel anxious about (many) poor decisions I made in the past.

Maybe I get like this when I have this nervous energy. I do everything in a hurry on days like this. I get so much energy but then I worry that I'm not using it for anything. And other times I have no energy. That was what happened the last time I was in community college (6 years ago). I started with enthusiasm and but the energy doesn't last. By the end of the semester I was tired and confused so I stopped with only a Certificate II. Certificate II serves no purpose but to proceed a Certificate III.

Certificate III might be enough to get a job on it's own or it might not. What kind of job. I worry if I don't get the right kind of job, if I aim to low I might be wasting my potential. But what to do? I could just do a Cert III, I could do a Cert III and then a diploma that transfers me into uni (a really slow way to get into uni), or I could just spend one year redoing year 12 so I could just get into uni. Once there I could do a bachelor of computer science... or some completely different degree. At least if I redid year 12 I wouldn't have to pick a field while doing it. Or would I? Different degrees might need me to have done different subjects in year 12.

I already regret the past enough but when I found out I can't sit the STAT unless I already did two years of college (STAT not needed for those with good grades) I felt like I was being even further stigmatises for bad decisions I made in the past. I was young and foolish (and very tired) back then (and I might have been on some bad meds for that whole time). People say it's normal to be foolish at 16 or 17 but I know that's not true. I know many didn't squander their youth as I did. People say it's normal not to know what you want to so at that age but I know many who did. I have to overcome my envy of youth. It's not their fault they're young. It's just me projecting my own negative emotions onto everyone else. It's hard to study for years when I have too much energy sometimes and feel exhausted at other times. That's what derailed me several times in the past. I was prescribed a mood stabiliser but all that did was make me feel exhausted all the time instead of some of the time. But at times like this I feel like I can't relax. I feel like I'm going nowhere (very) fast.

But enough of that tangent, how do I choose a future?
I must decide within the next 14 hours.