Third Time's the Charm (And Why That's Okay)

 

Twelve years ago, fresh out of college and brimming with the kind of confidence that only comes from not yet knowing what you don't know, I enrolled in a master's program. I thought it was the logical next step. Everyone seemed to be doing it. I wasn't doing it for any particular reason, and maybe that was exactly the problem. Life had other plans, as it often does, and I didn't finish.

The second attempt didn't even make it past the first tuition fee. I paid it, looked at the number again, and realized, with a mix of defeat and reluctant clarity, that this wasn't something I could sustain. Not then. Not that way.

So I let it go. Again.

There's a particular kind of grief that comes with giving something up, especially something you wanted, or thought you wanted. It doesn't announce itself loudly. It just quietly settles into the back of your mind, occasionally surfacing as a what-if, a not yet, or a maybe someday.

For years, the master's degree lived there. In the background. Patient.

And life, to its credit, kept moving. I built a career. I figured out what I was good at and, more importantly, what I actually cared about. I traveled. I grew into myself in ways I couldn't have predicted at twenty. Those years weren't lost time — they were the years that gave me something to bring back to the classroom. I just didn't know it yet.

There's a version of this story where I feel guilty about the detours. Where I look at the years between attempt one and attempt three and see wasted time, missed opportunities, a dream deferred for no good reason. But I've made peace with a different version: that I wasn't ready then, and that's okay. Readiness isn't something you manufacture. Sometimes you just have to live until you get there.

Last year, in my early thirties, I tried again.

This time felt different from the very start. Life had settled into something I could recognize. Not perfect, not fully figured out, but mine. I had a clearer sense of what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be. So when the idea came back around, I didn't dismiss it. I leaned in.

I'm now midway through a Master's in Communication Management, and I'm doing it while working full time. Let me be honest about what that looks like: it means squeezing readings into lunch breaks, writing papers on weekday nights when my brain is already running on fumes, and spending a good chunk of weekends in a classroom instead of on a couch. It means saying no to things I'd rather say yes to. It means operating in a near-constant state of "a lot."

And yet. I love it.

Not in a breezy, Instagram-caption kind of way. I love it the way you love something that asks a lot of you, something that stretches you just past the edge of comfortable and dares you to keep going. That's always been my motto: embrace the uncomfortable. Not because discomfort is noble or because suffering builds character in some abstract sense, but because the things worth doing almost never feel easy at the start. The discomfort is usually a sign you're in the right place.

Being back in school as an adult is a strange and wonderful thing. You notice everything differently. You ask better questions, not because you're smarter, but because you've lived enough to know what you don't understand. You bring your actual life into the room: the career pivots, the hard conversations, the things you've had to unlearn. There's a texture to it that simply wasn't there at twenty, when school was just the thing you did before real life began.

What I didn't expect was how much it would remind me that I'm always a student, in every sense of the word. Not just here, sitting in class with a notebook and a running list of deadlines, but everywhere. In my work, in my relationships, in the quiet moments when something shifts and I realize I've been thinking about something all wrong. Learning doesn't have an endpoint. It just changes shape.

Right now, mine happens to be very literal.

I'm writing this for anyone who has a dream sitting quietly in the back of their mind, waiting. The one you've started and stopped. The one that felt impossible once, or twice. The one you're not sure is still meant for you.

It might be. Timing is not failure. A detour is not a dead end. Sometimes the reason the first two attempts didn't work is simply that they weren't supposed to. The version of you who needed to do this thing hadn't arrived yet.

That version of you might be closer than you think.

Third time's the charm. But only because the first two times were part of the journey too.