Making a Stand… Part 1
This is where my story starts, even though I’m 25 years old and I’ve had a 3-year career. I don’t feel like I’ve lived until now.
Making a stand is clearly the most difficult thing I’ve had to do in my 25 years of life. It seems like easy advice to find what we want to do in life. People say, “chase your passion”. But in my experience, “finding your passion” or rather “admitting to what you like” is probably the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.
I was good at my job, or so everyone says. I got my graduate degree in flying colours and got placed in a company even before I graduated. Now, I’m working, away from my hometown, with a 7 figure salary, in a great company and everyone says I’m doing so well. And yet I felt incomplete. Wonder why?
You see, my job wasn’t where my heart was, even though most people I knew, were either jealous or proud of me, I never felt proud of myself. This was wreaking havoc in my brain. It was taking a toll mentally and physically. Because of social pressure, to do something I hated. I had obligations to fulfil. I hated the job, but I loved what it did to my bank balance at the end of each month. You could say it was kind of like Heroine, you know it’s bad for you, but keep at, for its effects. I knew my job was turning toxic for me.
When I turned 25, I had a wake-up call, a rather depressing wake-up call. Remember everyone asking you when you were 15 years old, what you wanted to be or where you saw yourself in the next 10 years. Yeah, I remember. I clearly remember the image I had of my self, at 25. It was so clear, I could print out that picture from my head, at any given time. Even after years, every time somebody asked me that, that same image popped into my head. Now I’m 25. I felt so disappointed. I was nowhere near to where I imagined myself to be. It only made sense for me to make up for all the lost years of my self in the next 2 years. At first, I was desperate, I didn’t know where to get started. I clamoured on to everything, I thought was important in my journey to that self-image. I started learning about handling finances, I started learning how to drive, I desperately fidgeted around trying to find my passion. But I couldn’t find one that I could stick on to. It was so difficult, I remember crying days on days. I felt to misplaced in the world. I was married to the love of my life, I had a great paying job, and a very strict and put together lifestyle and people would think, I had no reason to feel this way. I felt suffocated. I quite literally, felt like a fish out of water. I gasped for breath a lot of times when no one was looking. People would say, “Hey fishie, you have all the air you need right here, you don’t even have to suck the air out of the water. Why are you acting so immaturely? Just breath normally already. Why are you so adamant that you need to be inside the water.”
I had to make a stand. Do I give in to leading a picture-perfect life for the society and do I have to fight for the I picture I had of myself?
