Tell me about yourself.

[resonant]

I'm suddenly struck with the desire to know how other people do the things that matter most to them, how they find and follow their passions.

How do you decide where your heart is? How do you carve out time and energy to pursue it?

Are you on a new road or one you've been following for a long time? What have you learned that could help others? What false starts have you made, what poor judgments? What have you compromised, and what do those compromises look like to you now?

Comments

[thegrrrl2002.livejournal.com]

Good lord, I feel like the last person who should ever give advice on such things, but the one thing I learned is--be flexible. Things change all the time--your dreams, your desires, your job--everything. I've see people who were miserable because they hung on to what they thought their dream was. Even if their desires changed.

I went to grad school and spent quite few years doing post-doctoral research because I loved science. And then...I didn't. Academia was pretty sucky at that level, and the idea of becoming a professor and being mired in it was kind of depressing. I took a job in industry, doing bench work, then migrated to the business side of things because it was new and exciting and kind of fun.

I had a great job that I threw myself into because it was fun, and then the job changed--the company got sold, relocated, restructured, all those bad things and when I left it barely existed anymore. Then I took another job that I thought was going to be great and they, uh, didn't like me very much. I left there, too. My current job is kind of dull. It doesn't engage me at all but I'm too busy writing porn and bellydancing and beading to really care. Ten years ago I couldn't imagine feeling this way.

Strange how things change.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

At my very first office job, which I did in the summers during college, I had a co-worker who cheerfully told me, "Oh, I only work to finance my real life."

I wouldn't say my father was ambitious, when he was working, but he believed in that nebulous thing called "getting ahead," and my mother was career-minded because as a woman raised in the fifties she understood that a career was something that not just anybody was allowed to have. So I had never met anybody who'd spent a lifetime in jobs that were truly just for the money.

I was kind of appalled then, but now I think -- well, life has many components, doesn't it? and some of them you get paid for, and some of them you don't, and maybe in some phases of your life, it's restful to have the really important stuff not be the money-making stuff.

[thegrrrl2002.livejournal.com]

Restful! That's the perfect word for it. Science was everything to me for so long, and now, life is so much more....soothing. And a lot less competitive.

I think your co-worker had the right idea.