one critical piece of advice is that opportunities are fractal doorways
you can take an opportunity that seems small, a group meeting for an hour once a week let's say, and if you really commit and put a lot of effort into even a small opportunity, if you work to prop open that passageway, then you will find that it can surprisingly quickly multiply into many future possibilities, many future paths.
one of the members of your small book club desperately needs a babysitter for the weekend. that's a gig. another one hits it off with you on some obscure topic. the bulletin board at the place you meet has a flyer for a class on writing. you go, and now you're in an environment full of other people who are there for the same reasons. talk to them. over drinks one night an older member encourages you to apply for uni with one of your short stories you wrote for the class. et cetera.
I spent a lot of time paralyzed with indecision, trying to find just the right opportunity to get me where i wanted to go. that's the entirely wrong way to go about it. practice pursuing possibilities is more important than optimizing your choice of path, waiting for just the perfect opportunity to magically drop into your lap. It likely won't happen like that, it's not necessary, and you don't need to live your whole life at once. Frodo didn't arrive at Mt Doom by making the optimal choice on the first crossroads out of the shire.
Instead cultivate an attitude of engagement with whatever imperfect seemingly insignificant opportunities that are already in front of you, and keep an open mind & eyes, and trust in the fractal nature of reality. look for threads to pull, opportunities to pursue, and engage with people as if every one of them has something new to teach you, and somewhere new to take you that you've never been. they probably do. the more you engage the more you'll find out that this is true; trust that paths will lead to more paths even if you can't see them yet. trust that the big scary void question mark of a future contains not only unseen dangers but also an unseen unfurling infinity of options and paths, friends and lovers, work and play. i love u
