For someone who has spent a lot of time and energy yelling all over the Internet about my inability to identify what I want to do with my life, I sure have been relatively quiet now that I’ve started to figure it out. I wish I could tell you this is because I have been waiting to make some grand reveal with streamers and kazoos and dancing pandas, but I’ve never been the best at planning the party. I’d rather just show up fashionably late with a bottle of wine and my most apologetic smile.
The truth is, I’ve been kind of scared to throw my precious dream out in to the universe. In fact, the first time I said it out loud to myself I nearly swan dove under my pillows because hearing the words out loud felt so liberating and terrifying at the same time. Even then, it was months before I finally uttered the words to another human. And weeks still before I wrote them out here for you: I want to write – to really write. That is to say, I want to take my writing much more seriously. I want to write with intention. While I love writing about my favorite subject (me, obvi) I want to learn to write about television and film and nothing in particular, while still staying true to my voice.
I’m still quite surprised it took me so long to identify my dream. Like Desmond needed Penny, my only constant throughout college was my love for writing and all things pop culture. The third, fourth, even seventh time I changed my major the first thing I did was write about it. I started blogging my senior year of high school and since then there hasn’t been a day I don’t think about writing in some capacity. For as long as I can remember my purses and backpacks have always been littered with scribbled notes and post ideas.
As I mentioned above, acknowledging the truth I had known all along was not only liberating, but it was terrifying as well. What I fear, I do not really know.
Maybe now that I have audibly identified my dream, I know the next step is to pursue it. There is a certain amount of overwhelm that starts with such an ambiguous beginning, and I recognize that the only way to start is to just jump in but I’ve always been rather afraid of heights.
Maybe I am afraid of what people will think of my dream. Are you all secretly smirking at the computer screen? Taking over/unders on when I move on to my next silly idea? Cringing at my overuse of the comma?
I suspect that mostly I am afraid of failing. Now that I have started to tell people about this big dream of mine, I feel that I have been building some arbitrary sense of expectation.
Whatever my fear, it has manifested itself in some fairly impressive excuses. You see, the second I identified my grand master plan, I suspiciously became far too busy to put it in to action.
“I’ll wait until after this semester,” I could be heard saying in April. “Once I graduate I will have nothing but time!”
But then summer came and suddenly I felt like I was drowning in lab time and increased work hours and my new half marathon training schedule and summer socializing time and homework from the two classes remaining in my degree and wherever did the time go?! Shoot, better luck tomorrow. Yet despite all of that I miraculously had plenty of time for watching (and re-watching!) episodes of Mad Men and reading article after article about Mad Men and listening to multiple podcasts concerning Mad Men (in my defense I am currently working on an essay on Mad Men!).
Scott H. Young once wrote a brilliant piece on obsession being a prerequisite for success, in which he points out that if you want to succeed at something you are going to have to make less time for other pursuits. If I really want to make this dream a reality I have to stop making so many damn excuses, it’s time I started making some sacrifices, and I most definitely need to make writing my number-one-no-more-bullshit priority.
And I plan on getting right on all of that after this episode of Mad Men.
Kiddinggggg….
sort of.
ps. I recently updated my inspirations tab up top,
you should definitely check it out and
let me know what you think!
{image src has gone MIA so pinterest is the best I got}
