Amanda Blackman's Dark Place

Photo credit: Taelar Pollman · The Sentry

Lost in the Woods

If I sat down to talk to freshman year Amanda, I don’t know what I’d tell her. You’re going to change your major twice, change one of them to your minor, get a dream internship and love it, then decide to attempt a career pivot in the last year and a half? Yeah, I probably would tell her that, but that doesn’t directly matter to all of you new Lynx reading this. So instead I will tell you a story and lesson I learned last week.
I’m a control freak. Type A personality to the max, lover of all things structure and planning. So when my husband and a friend and I attempted to hike a 14er last week, I set out my backpack the night before, made the sign, and planned when all of us would need to wake up and leave in the morning. If everything went to plan, it would be the perfect hike.
Then it all went wrong. We got to the mountain late and we couldn’t drive all the way up to the trailhead, which added two miles each way. The trail was covered in snow. I got altitude sickness and one hell of a blister on my foot that kept getting stuck in snowbanks. We had to turn around with the end in sight. When we reached the bottom of the mountain and could see the parking lot, the trail became hidden under all of the snow as it melted throughout the day. The tracks from other hikers were gone. We had to just trudge down the mountain through snowbanks.
I had at least two full breakdowns during the hike.
But we made it. We are ok, and now we have a crazy story of how everything went wrong, but everything wound up okay.
Just because something doesn’t go according to plan doesn’t mean that it won’t be okay. Look at my college experience, freshman Amanda and new Lynx. I began with ignorant bliss, just going in the direction I thought was right. Along the way things didn’t go to plan (hello thinking I could double major in Marketing and Criminal Justice starting sophomore year). That doesn’t mean that my future and my career won’t be ok. If I didn’t take certain classes, I wouldn’t know my passion for the legal field. I wouldn’t have the courage to go down another unknown path and apply to law school. It’s unexpected, I know, first semester Amanda. But unexpected isn’t bad, it’s a new opportunity.