Part of me feels that I'm stuck here in Shanghai for the time-being due to personal reasons, but the main angst eating away at me recently has been the complete lack of direction to hit that next goal in my life. Major goal-setting isn't something I've revisited very much during the past few years as I've had a strong eye on getting my qualifications and experience as a scientist. It appears my choices in both areas have been somewhat questionable, as have my reactions to the outcomes in this area. I don't believe that quitting my last job was an incorrect step. I was essentially either a victim of a business' change of direction, or grossly misled to my role in the company & the potential for my skills to impact that business. Moving on was the right choice, but for the longer amount of time I've been away from that position, I've fallen for the romanticism of 'it wasn't that bad'. Second-guessing myself has become an art-form built from my well-honed process of careful calculation & planning, an art-from that I've been dwelling with for far too long.

I now recognise that I had become that person consumed with the pursuit of recognition for my skills & learning, to the point that the person had become a secondary or tertiary component of who I was or what I could be. Science came first - everything else was an optional extra.

I believe that the pain that I currently inflict upon myself stems from that my inherent self-belief that I always make correct & well-considered decisions regarding major events that affect my life, and on this and other occasions that my own well-founded process and deliberation could have been so wrong.

My own ego has taken a pounding from this decision/revaluation approach being fallible, and also my previous experience where at times, I've truly felt that my abilities as a professional appeared to devalued by my peers and superiors, or at other times, completely worthless to them. Combined with my approach where I came to identify my own self-image more from my title and skills rather than as a complete human being with other well-rounded skills and abilities, I found myself in quite a black place.

A lot of the former 'cognitive conditioning' stems from my time & experiences at university as a graduate student, and led me to a place that I questioned my own-self identity and worth to a point where I believed that I have little to offer to the world except for an assorted range of puns, snarky tidbits written on seldom-seen webpages, and explanations of scientific principles using restaurant table condiments and sauce bottles.

But I'm learning to see past this introspection. Because it can consume you. And it has consumed a lot of my time of late. And, I recognise that I do have a lot to offer and it is worth material gain to a lot of people in world. But it appears not here in SH (well, as far as I've looked so far). For a scientist, there really hasn't been too many options that have grabbed my liking. I've been offered a temporary relief teaching contract at a local international school, but the offer is truly an awful joke considering what they charge per student each semester. You earn far more in the generic English teaching area. Perhaps coming into the new academic year there will be more opportunities in science education from mid-to late 2007.

I've been a lot more pro-active of late and my life is getting a lot better for it. The work I've been putting into various little projects of mine is starting to come together, and I should get some form of income from it over the next 6 months. I also get to teach myself new skills, and believe that it shows initiative - something that I don't believe I have been able to exhibit in my past occupations except for getting around inevitable scientific/logistic roadblock.

I've thought a lot recently about where I could go next. For now, I'm still deliberating how much I should go back to go forward.