I'm about to go for my 2nd masters degree, and I'm terrified

Hey everyone, just wanted to get my fear off of my chest, and thought this was a good place to do it. Here's the backstory:

I am 40 years old. I have been married for 19 years, and have two amazing boys (19, and 14). I became a parent young, but it has been a blast to grow up with them.

I went to college, and graduated with my master's degree in computer science in 2003. My life was going great, but then I had trouble getting placed in a job because not many places were hiring at that time, as it was not long after the dot com bubble bursted, so it was kind of rough going, but I eventually got a job in 2007 and have enjoyed my career doing software design, and database management.

Well, I've also struggled with depression my entire life, and bad anxiety. I developed an addiction to pills that put me in a dark place mentally for a long time. I then had some massive marital issues begin in 2017, but we have been slowly working on them, and things are going well, but my mental health was still becoming an issue.

At the beginning of the summer, I started doing rideshare work on the side to help pay for my oldest sons college tuition, since he was starting in the fall. Well, being around so many people during this side gig, and battling my own depression and pessimism towards society actually inspired me to start being happy, and wanting to help other people be happy as well. I now am super nice to everyone I see, even if they are kurt with me. I've decided that at the age I am in my life, and being depressed for as long as I have been, I want to feel better, and I have realized that by making other people happy makes me feel happy too.

So I've been contemplating for months about a career change, and that is to try and get into mental health counseling. This would mean I would need to go back to college, and get a 2nd masters degree. I am terrified though because I would be going to school with people half my age, and doing a full career change at this point in my life terrifies me, but it also excites me at the same time because maybe I will learn some stuff about myself, and my disease and i want to help people.

It isn't about the money at all anymore. I own my house, and have a comfortable life. This is about learning and helping even one person.

This is a basic explanation on why I want to do this, but I didn't want this to be 800 pages long. I wanted to vent my massive amount of anxiety about this, and maybe get either some feedback about it. Is my fear unwarranted and I'm overthinking it, or am I really going in the deep end without a raft?

Thanks for reading 😁

Submitted September 07, 2019 at 07:05PM by Smeatbass https://ift.tt/2zZqB8R