I’ve always felt that a job was more of a job; a career should also be fulfilling and give back. Before applying to graduate school, I spent a lot of time asking myself: “what should I do with my life?” Well, it was right under my nose the whole time, and if you’re struggling I promise that it is there for you too. I know other people wonder these same questions all of the time; I have spent most of my twenties sorting through them myself. After quitting my job last September, I have spent a lot of time evaluating my purpose. When shifts like this happen, I find myself feeling a little frustrated that I lose my vision of myself so easily. Having a job hasn’t changed my ability levels in anyway, but it has been a different distribution of my time and helped me feel I am giving outside of my home.
This time recently has helped me realize that it can be easy to discount the things we know, or the things we can do, when we don’t have something external validating that. I’ve done so many things that were worth doing the last few months, but I still struggled. I have a different type of struggle now: juggling the things I am doing with my job well and completing projects around the house like I’d like. I hope this post can share a little more of my journey on what I am figuring out with teaching again + “what should I do with my life?”
“WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH MY LIFE?”
For my birthday right after we moved to Georgia, someone sent me the book (affiliate link) 5: Where Will You Be Five Years from Today?. As I filled out the book, I realized I wanted to do something different with my life. Additionally, I also realized I had some underdeveloped passions/talents that I needed to pursue. I feel like it is a great book to help you ask yourself questions and start figuring out things if you’re struggling.
As for what I ended up doing? It was obvious throughout my childhood once I was able to see the big picture. I realized I was one of the lucky people that sincerely has wanted to do the same thing my whole life, but worrying was keeping me away from actually doing it.
As a child, my Mom had a huge bookshelf outside of my bedroom with encyclopedias and some of her language books from college. I poured through both, always asked to get the language learning cassettes at thrift stores or yard sales when we saw them. Later in high school, I signed up for a camp in the 11th grade for teaching and I told everyone I wanted to be a foreign language teacher (pretty close, honestly). I chose the other closest options I could find that seemed practical. Until we moved to Atlanta, I never lived in an area where teaching ESL was a viable job option.
Through my various time in different jobs, I’ve learned that sometimes my passion is not a job. At times, like most recently, it has been reading. Other times, it has been blogging. It doesn’t really matter if the passion has been life long, but I do think it is important to have something that helps you wake up excited.
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While I love what I am doing now as a self-employed ESL teacher, at 29, I can definitely say that most of my jobs have not been ones I have loved. I can also say that I feel like it took the last few years before I found a vocation that I felt connected to my life’s passion. I’ve been a lunch lady, I’ve worked in a factory, I was a berry picker at a farm, I worked tech support on a phone for years… the list keeps going.
I think the big thing is to learn to know yourself, keep learning and discovering from your experiences, and realize sometimes it takes years of baby steps to find what your passions are. Look for the the little things that give you sparks of joy.
HOW TO DEAL WITH PERIODS OF DISILLUSIONMENT
When you graduate from college, sometimes the assumption is that things will go easily after that: you’ll find a job you love, you’ll make a decent paycheck, you’ll be appreciated, you’ll have a healthy work environment, and the list keeps going. Maybe you think your specific hobby you are passionate about will be super successful etc. I’m super happy for the people who that does work for, but my experience looked a lot more like flailing at the deep end. Since I graduated in 2011, I’ve put in over 1000 job applications, I’ve had jobs with work environments so bad that I once had a therapist tell me that she didn’t believe me, and I’ll be honest: it completely rocked my naive post-college self.
I hated paperwork that I was drowning in and the bureaucracy of school politics made me want to bash my head into something daily. I wanted teacher friends, but I found myself skipping the lunch room because it was a black hole of negativity. I went from thinking I had to be 100% passionate about a job to realizing that there were parts I would probably never love. I also learned that I had to focus on the parts that I was passionate about and just go after that.
Alternately, I’ve had jobs I was not passionate about at all, but they enabled me the time to pursue other interests or some money to pad our savings. I want to give a special shout out to these types of jobs because they are undervalued. Sometimes our passions have no connection to a job at all! While the one I have does, I know plenty of people who pursue passions in things that will never make them money ever and that is still extremely worthwhile. For example, I’ll probably always blog, but I don’t really make a lot from it and that’s fine.
THE REAL ANSWER TO “WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH MY LIFE?”
It is humbling to realize this, but sometimes your passion is more about the season in your life. Often while we are having an existential crisis, and asking ourselves things like: “what should I do with my life?”, we are wasting time where we could be progressing and doing the best in our surroundings. I don’t consider myself the best homemaker in the world, and yet, this is what I have been doing the last few months. I’ve spent time listening to podcasts on cleaning, I’ve spent a lot of time evaluating what things we should keep or get rid of, and then I made actionable goals to start working towards those. I spent time asking people who have excellent homemaking skills how they do things and I tried to really throw myself into it.
Was homemaking what I went to grad school for? No. Is homemaking what I thought I would be doing? No. However, it was what was available to me full-time and I decided I would use my time well. While in this past season, which I’m sure I’ll visit many times in my life, I also realized I should be grateful for what I was doing. I have many friends who would love to be a full-time homemaker and aren’t, and I wanted to just be very happy for the opportunity.
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From experience, I know how easy it can be to get caught up in the why’s or what’s of what is happening in life. I feel I have to ground myself in many situations. However, I’ve learned something from every single season I’ve experienced; sometimes that has meant new hobbies or passions and other times it has been a more firm resolve to seek and do better.