“…But what if I’m wrong?”: 5 Important Things I Learned From Embracing Career Change

In 2008, I moved halfway across the country back to my childhood home city because I was going through a divorce. I soon after became a broke single mother and thought, well if I have to start over at rock bottom, I might as well do something I want to do… and so, I started a photography business.

Fast forward to 2018: I was running a fairly successful photography business and brick-and-mortar studio, had gotten remarried, and… was starting to feel that something was off. I had fallen into running things the way that I’d be taught was the “right way”, and it felt misaligned, incongruous to what I stood for and believed it.

It started to feel like a ball and chain, and not in a cutesy way at all.

Then my stepdaughter started her senior year of high school, and it hit me:

I was missing it… “It” being motherhood.

I’d always dreamt of being a mother, and I had 6 miscarriages to be one. It was, and still is, the most important role I’ve ever had in my life. At that time, I found myself a mother of 5 (2 of mine, 3 of my husband’s), and I was so busy with my business I could barely breathe, and I felt motherhood slipping away so quickly… within 6 years, they’d all be grown up. I was watching time slip away right in front of my eyes and so deeply felt the last opportunity I had to spend time with them before they were all adults.

But I’d poured SO much of myself into my business. I felt like I just couldn’t walk away!

By the end of 2019, though, that was it. I officially closed the business.

In January of 2020, I went to Hawai’i solo to celebrate my 40th birthday. It was also a sort of pilgrimage, because I felt utterly lost without the identity of “photographer”. I had gotten a full-time job in marketing, but that felt soul-crushing and I just wasn’t sure where to go next. I went to find myself and figure out where the next 40 years would take me… I needed a direction to head off in.

In 2021, I went back to college…

and in 2024 I graduated with an Environmental Science degree and got a job in the environmental sector.

And in 2025, I feel the stir again. That whisper, the pull to something else. Right after I finished a degree and started a new career. So, what gives? Did I make the wrong choice?

So many people have asked me over the years, “how do you do that??” As in - how do you just take off in pursuit of something completely different? (either that, or they’ve called me “flighty”). To tell you the truth, I think I’m just built a little different in this regard. To me, there’s always been this driving feeling of the bigger risk being getting to the end of my life and feeling that I didn’t truly live, or that I missed something I was meant to do. That, to me, would be worse than not taking the risk.

But I’ve had enough conversations to know that this isn’t a normal thing. So because I’ve been here several times before and have found myself here again, I thought I’d explore everything I’ve learned along the way. Here are the 5 most important things I’ve learned from risking it all and setting off on a completely new path, over and over again. Maybe this will help you take a step towards your dreams today...

5. It isn’t easier to not do the thing

This is something that our minds will try to trick us about, but when it comes down to it, going a whole lifetime without writing the book that’s burning within you, or not creating the film, or not going to Paris, or not baking the most delicious and beautiful pies ever, because [enter the bullshit reason that our minds like to tell us are really important and rational and relevant here] is really, truly, more painful in the long run.

It will seem like it’s easier to not do it because the demons on our shoulders will give us about 10,000 perfectly good reasons why it’s just too hard to try. But is that truly what you want for yourself? A lifetime of spectatorship, of not trusting yourself, of nagging longing? This is where the question, “But what if I’m wrong?” comes in: “but what if I’m wrong about being a writer?” or, “but what if' I’m wrong about being an artist?” The short answer is, if it is in your heart to do something, YOU ARE NOT WRONG. You’re probably just scared; scared of the phantom “They” who will judge you in the way that your mind imagines it will hurt you the most.

Don’t let imaginary people - or even real ones - prevent you from doing the thing that moves your soul. That said….

4. It might make sense to NOT burn everything down (even if you feel like it or believe you have to)

I’ve been here enough times to know that it makes no sense to push myself to stay on a path I don’t want to be on. I’ve also been here enough to know that sometimes, it’s not always a smart choice to burn down everything I’ve built and try to build something fresh on top of it. One example of this is when I completely closed my photography business. I didn’t have to go through the entire closure process - and if I’d known Covid-19 was coming, I wouldn’t have had to anyway! I could have scaled way back and not lost as much momentum, especially as now in 2025, I’m taking photo sessions again. If I’d kept most of my infrastructure and just taken the time I needed to focus on my family, eliminated the business processes that felt misaligned and wrong for me, and implemented more of what I wanted to be photographing, I probably could have avoided a lot of the pain that came with “quitting”. This was a really hard lesson learned the hard way (and… see #1).

We humans can have the tendency to think that we need a clean slate before we can be the person we dream of being. Ask yourself: is there a way that you can reorient towards your dream life or dream career without burning everything else down? Maybe your dream is just a little adjacent to where you currently are. Feel into that. Stay with it a bit before getting the the gas can and the matchbook.

3. You have to learn to trust yourself

When I went back to school in 2021, I didn’t even do it “right” - not even when I was staring what I wanted in the face! I second-guessed every single move I made and tried to logic myself onto some kind of (society-approved) productive path. I succumbed to my own fear and emotional baggage and enrolled first for a marketing degree… within a few months I felt it was wrong and changed to Interior Design… and again, within a few terms of school, changed paths again. The point here is, I KNEW WHAT I WANTED WHEN I MADE THE DECISION TO GO BACK TO COLLEGE. I just didn’t trust myself when it came to making the big decision and tried to be “reasonable” instead… just to end up wasting time and money. Trusting yourself, truly embracing yourself as the one who ultimately knows best for you - to make the right decision, to do the work, and to follow through - is the only way you’ll have the strength to take that first step down the path to your calling. We learn to trust ourselves by following through on the things that we say we are going to do, taking small risks first and accomplishing them, and then taking bigger and bigger risks - and having yourself, carrying yourself, every step of the way. That doesn’t mean not also having a great support system, but it means that you have to build your own inner strength and resilience. And you do that through building trust with yourself the same way we build trust in any relationship.

2. Don’t wait for it to be perfect to start

The road to regret is paved with a lifetime of moments where you were waiting for the perfect time to start, or waiting until you were skilled enough to get it perfect to start, or waiting until you were the perfect person to start. The endless search for perfection will haunt you and prevent you from getting anywhere at all.

There is a reason that similar statements have been spoken for centuries - the only way to birth a creation out into the world, as its own little living entity, is to let go of the need for it to be absolutely perfect. This “need” is usually a fear disguised as something else, something that keeps us safe from the Big Baddie who will dislike your work and critcally tear your brainchild to proverbial shreds, and in the process, destroy the vulnerable viscera of your soul… somehow making true the fear that you are a cleverly disguised fraud.

In reality, though there may be some folks who don’t like your work, that monstrous fear that hulks behind you, whispering for you to endlessly revise your manuscript or delete your digital photos or paint over your most recent masterpiece because it’s somehow “not perfect,” that fear is a lie, a haunt that you are feeding in your own mind.

Put it down. I will be honest with you: that demon may not be able to be completely vanquished, but you can learn how to live with it, how to instead feed the cheerleader in your mind who fosters your courage, resiliency, and tenacity. Take their hand, and take a step - the world needs what you have to offer, and our world rewards the hero who acts despite their fear.

The perfect version of you to create your dream is the current version of you. The perfect time to start is right now.

1. You can’t mess it up anyway

   This was possibly the most difficult thing for me to accept: that my mind and beliefs were the main thing holding me back. The most significant example of this is finishing my science degree.

   In high school, I really loved Biology and Chemistry and often considered going into a STEM field. However, my math scores were pretty paltry because I didn’t like how time-consuming math homework was, and I’d often just not do it.

   I was told so many times by authority figures in my life that I was “bad at math” or that “because of my math scores” I wouldn’t be able to handle the workload of a science degree that it became a belief I carried. That belief is the thing that prevented me from going to college in the first place, and later kept me from pursuing a science degree until I was already in my 40’s. And then, when I even got an A- in Physics, I realized they were wrong all along. But did I have any regrets? No - because I believed that every experience in my life had brought me to that moment.

   When I realized in my late 30’s just how deep my limiting beliefs ran, I started a lot of deep emotional work to rewrite them. One of the new directions I took was I started to believe that if I could learn a valuable lesson, no matter how small, from every challenge and difficult situation I encountered, then I couldn’t mess my life up because everything truly was happening for me.” Every “mistake” transformed into the inner growth and emotional maturation that was required for me to move into the next big stage of my life.

   You can choose to believe that life is a playground, a proving ground for the psyche, and that every interaction, every decision, and every experience is part of a collective that develops you into the person you were meant to be. When you start to claim that belief, it frees you from the limitations that keep you small and stop you from adding your own importrant contribution to the world.

   So, go for it. You can’t mess it up anyway.