This has been something I've known since I was in high school, having first realized it on my first mission trip to Mexico. We spent a week working hard and long with only the basics, no technology, no luxury. I didn't miss my normal life at all. In fact, I was more upset to come home than anything. Every mission trip I've been on since has been the same. Coming home is more disappointing than anything.
Since this was something I knew before I really started looking into college majors, you would have thought my decision was going to be easy. It wasn't. Firstly, there are a lot of different majors to choose from. No longer are the choices teaching and nursing for women, which, let's be honest, is AWESOME, but really makes decision making a lot harder.
So when I started out contemplating my future career possibilities my senior year of high school, my choices were all things I was passionate about, things I loved to do. Art, writing, literature, and even some science - I loved them all. Art is what I'm most passionate about. I love creating and transforming something plain and bland into something awesome.
Unfortunately, reality hadn't yet been introduced to me. My mother made sure reality and I were very well acquainted. To my mother, financial security and stability are the most important things when making all major life decisions. This attitude is partly her personality type (she is the save for the future, not the present type), her upbringing (her parents lived through WWI, the Depression and WWII) and her life experiences (up until the past decade or so, my parents have been paying of some major business debt accrued in the 1982 Recession).
While I can understand all these driving forces now, I didn't in high school. I just wanted to know why my mom was such a Debbie Downer and harshin' my buzz. How I wish I could have had the insight I do now when I was choosing what to study. But, I hadn't yet taken enough psychology and sociology classes to understand what she was saying.
My mom has always been verrry vocal on how she thing I (and the sibs) should be living my life - and what she would have done that would have been far smarter, independent, frugal, you name it. To be fair, my mom has dealt with a lot of craptastic stuff in her life. The biggest being a very tragic accident for my family when she was 34.
My four older siblings were with her at the time and it happened on a cold December night when black ice covered the roads. The accident killed my youngest older brother just before his 4th birthday, injured by second oldest sister and oldest brother, seriously injured my oldest sister, leaving her in the hospital for months afterwards and left my mom with a severe head injury to the frontal lobe. According to people who knew my mom before the accident, her personality drastically shifted, which make total sense, considering where she was injured.
The accident happened six years before I was born. During that time, my mom was very sick from the head injury, fibromyalgia (a result of the accident) and debilitating depression caused by the loss of a child. It's very likely it took those six years before I was born to even start the grief process. To be perfectly honest, she's still dealing with it, 30 years later, every day. Heck, she can still smell the smells, see the colors, remember what everyone was wearing, how they all looked. I'm pretty sure she has PTSD and unless she decides to go to counseling (and stay this time), she'd probably going to continue reliving the accident and stay muddled in the grief for the foreseeable future.
At almost 25 (ahhhhh!) I know these things, I recognize the signs. At 18, all I knew was that my mom was shooting down every idea and every dream of a future I had. She still does that, and it's still something that I really struggle with. Parents are supposed to encourage your dreams, right? They're the people who are supposed to make you believe in yourself when everyone else thinks you're an idiot and foolish. It's so frustrating when one of those people makes you feel like your dreams and goals are "pipe-dreams" and unrealistic. So what if they are?! I always wanted to scream, it's my life to live!
My parents and I had worked out a deal where they would assist me with paying for college, I'd pay what I could from working in the summer and throughout the year and they'd fill in the rest, then I'd pay them back after I graduated. It seemed like the perfect solution. I sure as heck didn't have $30,000+ hanging around and no summer job I got would really help that much. Having just settled all their business debts at that time, my parents were very against student loans and my mother flat our refused to co-sign.
If I had been smart, I would have found another way to pay for school. I would have worked a year, or went part time. I applied for scholarships and grants, but I would have applied for more. Anything than to rely on my parents, because accepting my mother's payment solution also meant accepting her unasked for advice in all things college and future related and gave her a certain amount of control in my future in her mind - and probably a bit in mine too. And to my mother, an art degree was completely out of the question, so far off the table, I didn't even pursue it as a minor.
That's CRAZY. I loved art! Still do. I'm still creating, painting and drawing. I almost ended up in the Biomolecular Chemistry field, but thankfully the length of the program was a real deterrent in my mom's mind. She didn't want to be helping pay for seven years! Why, it only took her four years to complete her teaching degree in 1972! If that was good enough for her, then it was good enough for her kids. Besides, any more schooling and you might as well be a doctor.
I went through several false starts with majors before she stumbled on public relations. Admittedly, it's a pretty good match in terms of using my skill sets. It meshes the art side of things and the writing side of things together and they're both things that I love. I enjoy what I do - especially when it's on the more artistic side of things, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm doing what I do only because my mom wanted it done. I can't shake the feeling that every day when I'm going to work and all the dead lines and work is pressing down on me that there is no way I can endure this for the rest of my life.
Yeah, I did have my little rebellions along the way, like the internship I took purely because it was fun and interesting, not because it could help me get a corporate position, but overall, I did exactly what she wanted me to. And that really, really bothers me, because when it comes down to it, I'm the one who has to live with those decisions. ME. Not her. This is all on me, no matter how much I feel like she pushed me into it.
Two years after college graduation, I'm so confused and unsettled. I go to my job and occasionally I enjoy the creative things I do, but I don't feel fulfilled with my work. I'd always thought I'd use my talents to help people, to bring joy to others. Instead I'm using it to meet never ending deadlines, hour after hour, day after day to improve the company's bottom line.
Steve Jobs once said, "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." Regardless of whether he meant don't pine for someone else's life and mimick theirs, or don't let someone else decide your life for you, he has a strong point.
I can't keep living my life the way my mom wants me to live, or the way the rest of my family wants me to live. It might be all sunshine, rainbows, and lollipops, but it's going to get pretty miserable for me, if the past few months have been any indication. I have so many things I want to do and places I want to see and live...I can't stay where I am for the next ten years.
And that, perhaps, is the most heartbreaking. The company where I work is awesome and working there for multiple years would be fantastic. I love the people, the benefits would be amazing, but...I just...can't. I want to live my life, not merely exist. I feel like I'm just existing. I want to enjoy new experiences while I'm young enough to do all the things I want, not sixty years down the road after retirement. Forget that! So much of the world is left for me to see and so many people I still need to meet...I can't stay where I'm at. I know I can't.
This realization has been tough to deal with. I know I'll be disappointing a lot of people, especially my mom, but it seems like a pretty constant thing with her. I don't know where my path is going to lead, but starting right now, I plan to make the most of every moment. I need to find myself along the way. Somewhere, somehow I lost myself these past few years.
A friend was recently helping me sort through some of my confusion and she said something very wise. "I think for some things - like careers - it's between you and God. It's not your parents' place to nudge you in one direction or another. How do they know God's plan for you?" It hit me that I couldn't even remember if God had figured into my decision to go into PR and that's a sickening feeling.
Even if I take God out of the equation, do you know how scary and insane it is to realize that the biggest decision of my life might not have been based off of anything other than my mother's need for financial security and stability? Holy crap. Seriously, what the heck was I thinking?!
2013 was a learning year for me and, according to the Chinese zodiac symbols, not the greatest year. Full of bad decisions, heart break and painful life lessons, but 2014 is looking up. I have hope. I see what's wrong and I'm ready to fix it. Here's some of what I've learned:
- My happiness falls on me. If I want to be happy, I can't be living someone else's dream or following someone else's rule book. This means some changes are necessary. I can no longer live the life of a home body like my home body family wants me to. I need to explore and experience other places, people and cultures.
- It's never too late to go after what you love to do. It might not be easy, but it's not too late. If I want to do something with my art, or help people, there's nothing stopping me. Sure, logistically I may have to save up for a couple months or take a new job somewhere else for a year before I can enroll in an art program, if that's my path, but I'm the only one that can keep me from what I love at this point.
- It really does not matter at all if my mom is happy with what I do. She isn't the one who has to do it day in and day out, so really, it's my bidness, not hers. I'm sure throughout history there have been countless parents that haven't been pleased with their childrens' career choices (Am I right, parents of Amelia Earhart??). Eventually they'll get over it. Hopefully, when my mom sees how happy and fulfilled I am doing something that she didn't have planned out for me, she'll get over it. Knowing my mother, it'll probably take more time that that, but hey, that's her bidness. Besides, as I'm not planning to become something shady or criminal, I think she should be happy regardless.
So If anyone knows of some sort of PR type job in the San Diego area, or in the Austin, Texas area, that'd be cool. :) They both have some good art programs at their unis and are WARM, unlike Illinois right now. (For the record, Illinois is kinda sucky.) And I think I need a change of pace. I need to go off on my own and find myself. Maybe I need a jolt to rekindle my spark. I miss it.
Sorry for the rant, I hope that my struggles finding my place will help someone out in the future. There are so many possibilities out there, never think you don't have any other options that the ones in front of you.
Keep up the awesome,
Aby
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