I do this a lot, and when I do, it can be frustrating and stressful. I know I’ve been making a lot of mistakes and having a lot of anxiety lately, so I wanted to share a piece of my life that I feel like I should share with you.
It was probably the last time I’ve had a serious girlfriend and I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to do with my life. I thought about being a photographer, I thought about starting a business, I thought about writing, I thought about being a teacher. I tried to think of all of the things that I would be passionate about, and in the end, I finally concluded that I was going to keep being a journalist.
So when I was about to graduate from college, I decided that I was going to move back to New York. I was a graduate student in journalism, a very exciting job. I had a lot of friends, I had a lot of connections, I had everything that I had ever wanted. And then I finally realized that I was going to leave, because I knew that I was going to be a failure in my chosen field.
First of all, the term “failure” can be a tricky one to define.
Failure implies either that you lost your job or that you were unable to do what you wanted to do but you had the courage to do it. But failure can be a lot more than that. It can be a situation where you make a terrible decision that you later realize you didn’t really need to make.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who left her job to become a freelance writer. She said that the day she told her boss that she was leaving her job was the day she realized she was going to be a failure in her chosen field. She came to the realization that she was going to have to do something that she had no desire to in order to prove that she was worth keeping around.
I think of that situation as a situation where you decide to do something that you don’t need to do. Or a situation where you realize that you dont really need to do a certain thing. You just do it because you are compelled to do it.
The “why” behind that statement is hard to pin down, but one thing is certain: it’s a result of her decision to leave her job. To be honest, though, she had a lot more to do that day than I could begin to imagine. I don’t know if she had a “motiva” to do anything in particular at that time, but she did take a day off at the end to hang out with her family to decompress.
As a writer, and a journalist, its tough to just do one thing, especially when there are so many other things that need doing at the time. When you have a deadline, its tough to just do one thing and not worry about things like how you are going to get the story out the next day, how your editor is going to get it out tomorrow, things like that. But it is also one thing that you do to live. If you have deadlines, deadlines, deadlines.
I’m having trouble with this one because I feel like a lot of the time I’m just reading in a little piece of my own mind and thinking about things I want to talk about, and I end up reading news that I know I don’t want to hear. But when I am reading about someone else’s story, I feel like I am not just reading a story, I’m reading the story of a person.