The Dream Job : Going the Distance

It’s never good when you get a text from your best friend that says,
“I don’t know if I feel like going out tonight. I’m all weepy and crabby today.”
Knowing her, I realize I have two choices:
1. Take her word for it, because when she says she’s in a bad mood she means it. No use arguing with her; things will only get worse.
2. Test the waters. Feel her out. Maybe what’s bothering her is worth confronting, debunking, even comforting.
I bit the bullet and chose option two.
“What’s wrong, love?” 
“Oh, probably the weather and I started freaking out about school earlier.” 
She has decided to quit her full time job working as a customer service representative for a hearing aid manufacturer [what joy] to go to culinary school. The risks are real – she’s taking on school loans, she’s going to try and juggle school work and a part time job to support herself,  not to mention that she’s quitting a full time job when more than 8 percent of the country can’t even find a part time job. She has every reason to be terrified.
And yet. I’ve seen her in a slump, exhausted of repeating the same conversation with customers more than 100 times each day. Personally, I’d rather see her bustling around a bakery, whipping up delectable pastries we can devour, even if we gain 100 extra pounds in the process. Hey, since we’re talking sacrifices, right?
But it’s a toss up, a whole lot of “I don’t want to do this part” no matter which path she takes. She doesn’t want to work the job she has forever, but she doesn’t want to take on debt, risk her financial well-being and her stamina to make it through school.
“What if I fail?” she asked in the car on our way to see my husband play on Friday. Thankfully, she had changed her mind and decided not to wallow in worry over something that’s months away.
“I’m sorry, what? You? Fail school?” I asked.
“Yeah! What if I get so frazzled trying to support myself and get through classes that I flunk out?”
A silly question, in my opinion. She, of all people I know, is least likely to fail.
But as I’ve spent the last several months fiddling with blog ideas and freelance work, I’ve asked mself the same question about nearly everything.
Grad school: what if I flunk out? So I decide to wait until life “settles down” a little bit. [I have no idea what that means, either.]
Freelancing: I’m not a business person – what if I can’t handle the responsibility?
Blogging: what if they don’t like what I wrote? What if no one cares about this but me?
I’ve come to the realization that with any dream job or career path we chose, we have to keep in mind the journey and not just the destination. We have to be willing to ask, how will I get there? And we have to be willing to go the distance.
Freelancing and blogging require a lot of capabilities that I wish I didn’t have to think about. I’ve had to work on a business plan for my freelance work. Did anyone else know that this requires math?! Even with a calculator and guidance from other freelancers I know, my brain hurts. It’s excruciatingly painful to admit that my teachers were right [although I have yet to use algebra, mwahaha.]
I’ve also had to learn HTML coding. Don’t get me wrong, I only know a handful of code thingys [is “code phrases” the proper term?] but still, who knew that ugly series of letters and symbols actually did things, and that if you can’t figure it out things might disappear?!
And apparently “not being a morning person” is not conducive to productivity. If I could change my biological make up, I would, but for now I’m just trying to find some sort realistic incentive that will convince me that God created 6 a.m. for anything other than sleep.
I can’t tell my best friend not to look at the big scary numbers or not to think about how she’s going to be able to support herself on a part-time job while she’s getting her degree. I can’t be a successful freelancer and blogger without coming up with a business plan and crunching my own numbers. I can’t even tell her where she’ll be at the end of it; she’ll have a degree, but will that mean she’ll find a job right away?
And will I want to be a freelancer forever?
I mean, aren’t I a little young to be thinking about being my own boss?
And think about all the taxes and invoices I’ll have to keep track of if I’m going to do this!
And is this blog going to be a part of my writing career for the next 30, 40, 50 or more years?
There’s so much responsibility involved, and how will we know for sure that the destination is worth the journey it takes to get there?
We don’t have the answers. I don’t think we’re meant to. But if we’re too scared to even ask the question, to pursue the “what if I try this?” then we are choosing to live in the void, the unknown of what could have been.
So here are a few inspirations from around the web to keep you motivated :
I’m officially a Midnight Hustler, are you?
Part of pursuing our dreams requires being selfish.
Writing as an expression of life. I need to read Natalie’s book (and Melissa’s blog!) more often.
The Literary Ladies’ Guide to the Writing Life. A great article and a book I need to get my hands on.

The Elusive Age.

I wish I knew what this thought meant, but I have no way to articulate it, except to repeat it over and over again. I want something new. Am I thinking clothes? Or house decor? Or a new design for my blog? Or a new haircut? Or… (_fill in the blank?_) No, it’s deeper than material things. I wish I knew what it meant. And why.

Perhaps it’s an emerging pattern of nostalgia. Every year at this time I remember that I spent a Fall in Europe wandering and reading and writing and learning to my heart’s content. You can take the phrase ‘travel bug’ literally. It’s an itch that must be scratched and when you don’t it gnaws away at your thoughts, convincing you that if you could just go someplace new, everything would be better.

But am I now incapable of being happy where I am? I am happy. I have a wonderful husband and a good job doing something I actually like, and I have a great group of friends and family. I just have this restless feeling. Like I’m waiting on an elusive “new”, an elusive “better,” an elusive “different”, and I don’t know when or where or how I may find it.

A lot of people my age feel this way. A lot of people who were once my age felt this way, and they either did something great or resigned themselves to the waiting and the wanting. How will I deal with it? How will my friends deal with it? Our days aren’t meant for biding our time or waiting for something to come to us. We’re meant to reach out and grab hold of what we want. But what if we don’t know what that is? How do we find out what it is? What is the “great” that we might do? I’ve just asked a lot of big questions, many of which may not be answerable. It’s better than not asking, though. It’s better than not contemplating what it is we’re doing. I found this quote the other day, and I really hope that I can find a way to live up to it, and that my peers do, too. I have a feeling that this is what we want, and what we are most afraid of.

“What we are is God’s gift to us. What we become is our gift to God.” -Eleanor Powell