I've been pursuing a truck driving job since February. While in truck driving school, I was prehired at Swift Transportation, and officially signed on with them after graduating. Company orientation was three days, and I then started Swift's driver training with a mentor driver. This training period lasts 240 driving hours, and I currently have around 140 after three and a half weeks. It took a few days for me to build up my driving endurance before I really started racking up hours, and several days were spent not driving. Not driving is actually what I'm doing again now. My mentor has to sort out some driver's license technicalities, then get his wife to doctor appointments, and since he's from Oklahoma, that's where we've been for a couple days. We've stayed at his parents' house the last two nights while he sorts out the license, then he's going to put me up in a hotel for another two nights when we go up to where he and his life live. It's nice having a break from the road, but it would be nicer to be done with training and take my breaks at my own home instead of someone else's. One of the frustrations with training for anything is not being able to use my own methods, being on someone else's schedule, and in general not having control. This was one of the issues I had with medical training, too. Thankfully, I'll be done with driving training by mid April. I'm kind of bitter that I'm sitting around instead of racking up hours and completing training, and that I'll likely be stuck on the road in a stupid truck with someone I barely know on my birthday this year. I'm pretty sure I could ask to have a day or two back home to celebrate, but that would just prolong training that much more. While we're holed up in Oklahoma, I'm trying not to focus exclusively on the negative aspect of prolonging my training, and instead look also at the life experience I'm gaining by getting to know new people in a new place.
Speaking of medical training, I've been toying with the idea of getting back into it. I don't like having this unfinished thing hanging over my head. I also don't like the idea of not living up to my potential. At the same time, I need only think about the details of medical training and I can feel my anxiety rising, increasing my pulse and breathing rate. I want to get counselling in any case, but if I do get back into medicine, it will be a necessity. The anxiety caused by medicine, combined with the fact that I can utilize my intelligence and desire to help people in non-medical careers, make me think I should keep searching for another career. I never planned to stay in trucking more than a few years, since there aren't opportunities for the type of advancement I would want, and it doesn't help people as directly as I want to do. It's irritating that most careers I could get into would take me out of the hands-on realm and back into training for a while, which makes me hesitant to pursue anything else too soon. Actually having an income is nice, too, but at the same time I could do a lot better for myself than a trucker's income.
So as not to give too negative an impression of how I'm doing, I do feel better off now that I was six months ago. I'm hopeful about the future, and even the aspects of the future causing trepidation are not preventing me from wanting a future, but rather causing me to plan more thoroughly. Aside from figuring out my next career, my big focus now is paying off my debt. It should only be a couple more weeks before my smallest loan is paid in full, which will feel like a big accomplishment. When I finish training and my income stabilizes, I'm going to more fully implement Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover, and I'm very excited about getting on top of my finances.
Lots to sort through, but it's good to know I'm not stagnating in life. Have a good one.
Scott
