Please feel free to ask pretty much any and all questions, and also to make suggestions.

How I will conclude my life is a year from now will depend on: my perceived happiness, level of job/educational enrollment satisfaction, whether this life change works out as I hope, relationship status, finances, etc. I keep a pretty regular journal (sometimes written, sometimes video) so I will look back on my entries a year from now and compare them to the ones I'm making then.

Context:

I'm a 31 year-old guy from the USA with an M.A. in Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. The past five years (since fall 2020) I've been living and working at a university in Japan and prior to coming here, I anticipated staying in linguistics (in the academic sphere), but after struggling to find a subfield which I feel like I can contribute in, I decided in 2022 to pivot to bioacoustics/animal linguistics at the end of my employment contract (it was five years, ending soon in 2025). I figure I need more formal education to have any hope of finding work related to this (whether that be in the academic field, or working for government environmental orgs, non-profits, whatever), especially in biology, so I am going to try to go back to school.

Another major goal of mine is to try to live closer to my family again after living away from them for the majority of the past 7 years, so I'm moving back to USA. I'm not sure if I can fulfill both of these desires (get a strong biology/bioacoustics education and also live close to my family) while also maintaining affordability and personal happiness.

The past five years I was in a quite nice job all things considered. The salary was comfortable, my life was satisfying, and I was in a pretty incredible relationship for over two years of it, that only had to end because of family planning issues (partially related to this move) and not personal connection ones.

I'd say I was was much happier and my life was better one year ago than it is now. But part of that is because I'm well-into the moving process / job quitting process right now. It's possible this is a low point for me because of the stress and uncertainty, and I feel much better about the state of my life in a year. But I can also see how if in a year from now I don't have much more clarity or stability then I could have an even lower opinion of my life due to this dragging on for so long.