Lately I keep yo-yo-ing between feeling proud of who I am and then feeling disappointed in myself.
I have been a barista since I graduated college. I am starting to wonder, just like Meg Ryan in "You've Got Mail": do I do it because I love it, or because I haven't been brave?
I know what I am worth, yet my parents say that I settle for a lot less.
It scares me that in one year I will have to go out in search of my own insurance plan. What scares me more than that is that I may need to find a job where I sit all day, chained to a desk and telephone, in order to obtain a good insurance plan.
So what do I do?
Recently I have taken a cake decorating class and I plan to take more. I would like to start sewing. I would love to own my own coffee shop. I may even want to become a teacher. It's just a matter of igniting the motivation and making the decision to stop thinking and start doing.
I know that I have so many talents that are waiting to be unleashed, like a seed beneath soil that no one sees until the right ingredients bring it to sprout. It is in the continual watering of the soil with hopeful expectation that something will sprout where I feel the most stuck. I am like a novice gardener: I become so discouraged when something I've tried has shriveled up, or I keep watering and nothing ever sprouts; I feel like a failure.
Sometimes I even feel lazy, like I am just expecting that things will fall out of the sky for me. I wonder if deep down I'm really just a brat from upper-middle-class suburbia who's never had to work for anything. It sounds silly, but I find that since I've graduated college, I haven't had to work hard for a lot of things.
Have I stayed in the coffee and restaurant world simply because I am afraid of putting forth the work of finding something different? Am I just staying in these types of jobs because I haven't taken the time to research what I may be able to do instead?
I may be suffering from a mild form of Peter Pan disorder because there is, admittedly, a part of me that doesn't want to buckle down and sacrifice in order to invest for my future. That childish part of me expects that I'll "get there eventually," as if it were to fall from the sky or I will "one day" find the motivation to change my circumstances.
But I also want to know where this desire to "find a better job" is coming from. It is true that I am not going to make a career out of being a barista. I would love to be able to do so many different things in life to earn a living. The problem I am facing is to choose something that will at least pay the bills and fulfill my basic needs so that I am able to do all of the things that I want to do, like learning how to decorate cakes and how to sew.
But is this desire simply based on insecurities? Am I just trying to appease my parents? Am I looking to be taken more seriously? Do I even want to be taken seriously?
The real question is, what do I want? I'm not sure I can answer that question confidently, but I do know that I want to "do the thing that makes [me] like no one else," a quote taken from the movie, "P.S. I Love You." In that movie, the character, Holly, has just turned thirty and is unhappy in her career. Her husband urges her to remember the person she was when he first met her: filled with ambition, exploring creative possibilities, and using William Blake's quote "My business is to create" as her life philosophy.
"I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create." -William Blake
I don't want be somebody I am not simply because I am trying to conform to a standard that may in some ways, make my life "easier," like finding a higher-paying job with benefits. But I know that at some point, I do have to face the realities of living expenses. But I do know that whatever I end up doing, I have never been one to conform and I'm not going to start now.
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