How crashing out in my late twenties lead me to a career pivot

“It’s easy to get stuck in the mindset that the career you choose in your late teens is a life sentence and abandoning it will set you back.”

If you, like me, romanticised watching Carrie and the girls hop through fabulous bars, clubs and restaurants in Sex and the City, you probably remember thinking they had life all figured out.

I’ve recently binged the series again, and now I’m that bit closer in age to them (Carrie was 32 in the first season), I see it differently. Though their ultra-glamourous worlds and wardrobes will forever be aspirational, I noticed the moments of struggle, setbacks and self-doubt as well. It made me realise that I might be living my Sex and the City era.

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This was particularly true around a year ago. I’d woken up with an aching body after coming home at 3am, and as I washed the beer smell off my skin and sipped my freshly brewed tea, back slouched against the headrest of my bed, I began to take stock of my life. How did I end up here?

I’d sworn after I hung up my apron at my last hospitality job in my early twenties that I’d never put it back on. But here I was, covering a busy bar shift in the city, pouring beers into the early morning, wiping down sticky counters and re-entering a world where the customer is always right.

After moving from Brisbane to Melbourne in 2024, I dove headfirst into the rat race. With a degree in journalism and industry experience in hand, I was ready to take Melbourne’s media landscape by the horns. To me, it was the big city that never sleeps, home to major news channels and publications.

A few months of casual Pilates teaching later, paired with a job I had little passion for, I realised Melbourne may have actually grabbed me by the horns, dragged me through the mud, knocked me into a few boulders and then washed me off in the Tan.

I was enjoying my new life in my new city, bar-hopping with new friends, exploring new suburbs and lapping up the convenience of living between Windsor and Prahran. But still, I was desperate to get back in the media industry, a place I’d been aching to rejoin.

Impatient and in need of a change, I booked a one-way ticket to Greece, shortly followed by a one-way ticket back. Then, before I knew it, I was flung back in the throes of Melbourne’s job hunt. I felt like I had changed but the circumstances around me hadn’t.

I could say it’s been a treat having time off, that I’ve picked up new hobbies, read countless books, slept in and gone for walks. But it’s not entirely true. Anyone who’s been there knows the job search can be a soul-sucking, confusing, Groundhog Day venture. One day I’ll wake up and book in Pilates, grab coffee with a friend, spend time preparing for an interview. The next day I’m staring at a wall, waiting to hear back from five prospects, with no life admin left to check off my list.

Yet somewhere between all the Seek submissions, interviews and hours spent waiting for call-backs, I decided to pivot. I took stock of what I really wanted to spend my days doing, and managed to weasel my way into a Master’s in Counselling, due to start in February.

While the prospect of starting a new degree means throwing myself back into student life, student debt and student dinners, I keep reminding myself that prioritising learning is never a mistake, and life has no set timeline. It’s easy to get stuck in the mindset that the career you choose in your late teens is a life sentence, and abandoning it will set you back. But the truth is, you can be more than one thing at one time.

At age 35, Carrie was the last of her friendship group to put down a deposit for her apartment. Her first book came a season later, after a decade of writing her magazine column. And she didn’t even enter the world of podcasting until her mid-50s. If Sex and the City has taught us anything, it’s to move at your own pace.