Careers and Confusion
I don’t want to be a professional blogger.
I know a lot of people that do want that. They want nothing more than to spend their days writing for their blog. Despite that basically being my current title (I’m pro even if I’m not rich, hehe), it’s not what I want to do with my life. Or, more specifically, I don’t think it’s all I want to do with my life.
Maybe it is. Maybe I do love blogging, I’ve just been blogging about the wrong things (namely, myself). Maybe I just need to start doing more joint projects and blog for other people once again. Maybe I need new topics and a new direction. Or maybe, like I started to say in the beginning, I just don’t want to be a professional blogger. I still want to earn money from blogging. I still want to keep blogging. I still love sharing my thoughts and life with whoever cares to read about it. But I don’t want that to be all that I am.
I never really planned to be someone who makes money from blogging. It all just sort of fell into my lap. I have a compulsive need to write and share – I would be doing it whether I made money or not. When I decided to try to make a little cash to cover my web hosting expenses I didn’t realize it would turn into a quest to make more and more. Making money with blogging is something I accidentally got into, and while I absolutely love working for myself it’s not really my dream career.
The problem is that I don’t have a dream career. There isn’t something that I’ve always wanted to be or do. There isn’t a dream that’s waiting to be fulfilled. I feel like I’m in a cliched quarterlife crisis, but the crisis has always been there. I’ve never known what I wanted to do. I generally pick something and pursue it just long enough to realize I don’t want to do that for years. Nothing has stuck with me long enough to become anything worthwhile.
I’ve always been one of those people that everyone just assumed would be successful. Now that I’m an adult and I’m just not, it’s frustrating.
What do I want to do?
What kind of career would be good for me?
I’m constantly wrestling with these decisions and never developing any decent answers. I wish I could. I wish someone could just sit down and pick a career for me or tell me what to do. To bad it doesn’t work that way.
Don’t panic! You’re really young. You have loads of work-friendly skills. You have the next while of your life planned out a bit. “Success” is a hard thing to pin down anyway, and what looks like success from the outside doesn’t always feel like it from the inside. My experience suggests that the most successful careers creep up on people or gradually emerge from a web of interests and chance encounters and opportunities taken. Go with the flow.
How funny. What youre doing possibly could be something id be happy doing as my career. But you are doing it and it isnt yours. You don’t have any idea at all? Hmm maybe something with food you really seem to like your food blog. Maybe a book writer? I have no idea what I want to be either. And im older than you. Im sure it will come to you, and a lot of people have more than one dream career over their lifetimes. Whenever I start getting panicked about finding a real career rather than a job I think of juila childs who was in her mid 40s before she even started her cooking career and look at how successful she was and how much fun she had. So we both arent near our mid 40s we have plenty of time :)