The Brave and the Stupid

So, here we are… I am officially unemployed!

This is my first jobless day since I started at City Gateway almost five years ago, and the countdown has started. I’ve got some time, but ultimately I’m facing the very real prospect of moving back home with my parents – becoming one of those millennial statistics about late-twenty-somethings who can’t afford the rent in the city because they either can’t find a job or they’re doing a very low-paid (or unpaid) internship.

Now, having spent the last five years working in the apprenticeships and work-based learning sector for an organisation whose purpose is to help NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) young people get on to and stay on a career ladder, I could write a whole dissertation on how offensive and harmful I find the idea of unpaid internships (or even ‘work experience’ that lasts longer than about three weeks) but I’ll skip the dissertation seeing as no-one’s actually going to give me another degree for it and simply say they stink. Workers should be compensated for their work – full stop.

Buuut I digress. The reason I’m facing this prospect (and getting my knickers all in a twist about internships) is because (as I wrote about before) I am attempting a career change. And, turns out, hopping industries is hard! Yesterday – my last day at City Gateway – was hard. It was a weird, sad day, filled with goodbyes (I hate goodbyes) and to be honest, my emotions have been pretty up and down since this whole process kicked off a few months ago. In my Grand List of Plans, we are already at Plan C, and there have been moments where I wonder if I am completely certifiably bonkers.

…

More bonkers that I normally am, I mean.

Ahem.

I have some pretty awesome friends, and a couple of them have sent me cards over the last couple of weeks – one sent me a bright purple postcard that says ‘Everything is going to be okay’ in big friendly white letters on the front. This postcard is now pinned to the cork ‘happy board’ in my room, where I can see it from my bed, and it serves as a useful reminder not to panic when I’m trying to sleep!

A week later, I got another one that talks about the beauty of dreams – inside, my friend had written a message of encouragement, in which she tells me that she is proud of me for having the strength and courage to take the steps I am to go after my goal. She thinks I’m brave!

Now, aside from the fact that both of these cards touched me deeply, made me feel very loved and reminded me how fantastic my friends are, I’d not really considered the idea that what I’m doing is something other people would be proud of, or that might be the brave thing. I’ve more often wondered if I’m doing the hot-headed stupid thing!

I didn’t have to leave where I am. I chose to, and I chose to look for jobs outside my current career path. I chose to not look at jobs in different departments, or in companies that do the same thing as we do, and honestly there are days where I wonder if I’m just being stubborn. I certainly don’t feel brave.

But maybe – just maybe – the brave and the stupid thing are sometimes one and the same? Maybe I’m being stupid to not make the safe choice… and maybe I am being brave, to chase after a fulfilling career, and a job that makes me happy. Maybe sticking to my principles and not going after roles which are paid well below my current salary, experience level and skill set (I am not an intern! I have more to offer than that!) is stupid… but maybe it’s brave, too. Maybe having the courage to stick to what I know is right (I will fully go to the bat on this: unpaid work experience for anyone who is not a student is not appropriate) is brave?

Of course, I could just be being stupid. But if Plan D happens, I will regroup in my childhood home with the support of my wonderful family and make the next – hopefully less stupid – choice.

GULP.

 

 

Wishing and Dreaming

I’ve been thinking recently about wanting. Desiring, dreaming, wishing, hoping, longing… and all the vagaries in between.

For a long time, my motto was “Hope is a bitch” – my reasoning being, of course, that if you don’t hope, you can’t get let down. (It gets more positive, stay with me…) Take life as it comes, stop imagining how wonderful your life would be ‘if only…’ and get on with enjoying your life as it actually is! It took me a while to learn that lesson, and when I did, it was immensely freeing. Not caring what happened to me (beyond the basic necessities, I mean… otherwise it gets self-destructive and that’s not good) was a breath of fresh air, because it meant that I could look forward with open-mindedness to whatever adventure (or lack of) fell into my path. I can’t control the way my life goes – people die, jobs fail, friendships change, plans fall through – so why try? Trying and failing to control the flow of my life was stressing me out unnecessarily, so I stopped.

However, pretty soon I began to feel a vague niggle of discomfort when people asked pointed questions – questions like “What’s your dream?”.  There are people in my life for whom this is a big question, and a couple of these people are ones for whom I have a lot of respect and admiration, so I found myself increasingly unable to brush the question aside. The trouble is, I couldn’t answer it, either! I didn’t know the answer. I knew my plans – my achievable, sensible, plans – and I knew that I had this vague desire to be ‘happy’ – but that’s not really it, is it? I’ve written before about the crisis of faith I had in my life plans when I began my ‘worthy’ job, working for an education charity; and while this one-day-at-a-time, hope-is-a-bitch, go-with-the-flow attitude went a long way in cushioning the blow that the loss of my carefully structured system dealt, after a while, I began to reach the point where something was needed to fill the void.

Sure, I’d torn down the destructive, restrictive reliance on my own plans and capabilities, and conceded that I have very little control over my own life. This – make no mistake – is a Good Thing. From it, I was able to shuck off the weight of responsibility for running the world (albeit a small world of my own making), and rid myself of the exhausting drive which told me I would be happy, finally, if I could just… reach the next milestone, find the right job, the right person, the right house, blah blah blah. Ridding myself of these SMART targets and long-term goals was such a relief, and although it wasn’t easy relaxing my grip, I began to learn to enjoy the ride – to dance to the music. But the gap that my plans had left, that something-to-aim-for that draws us inexorably forward; well. What’s your dream? Money no object – plans notwithstanding – what makes your heart beat faster and your face light up?

Not a clue, Guv’nah.

So what’s the difference? I maintain my uneasy relationship with hope – in all honesty, the word still means something insidious and destructive to me. Hope speaks of falseness, of the unattainable, and of a reliance on luck, fortune, destiny, divine intervention… whatever. And it pretty much always lets you down. Ultimately, to me, the word ‘hope’ is synonymous with ‘vulnerability’ and, inevitably, ‘hurt’. Ok, so hope is out… but apathy, or fatalism… that’s no good either. Giving up all semblance of a goal was proving empty – I was enjoying the ride, dancing to the music, but I felt something was missing. I guess it was knowing what drives me – my purpose, if you like. I missed that spark of light that you see when people are tapping into what makes them ‘them’… there had to be a balance to be struck.

So here’s the thing. This is where I think the thread changes colour and moves on into the next tangle. Hoping – the way I read hope – is out. It’s passive. Wishing on a star, mumbling a desperate prayer alone in your room, fruitlessly willing your life to be different. Passive, see? But to have a dream – that’s active. “A dream is a wish your heart makes”? Sorry, Disney… FALSE. A dream is something that stirs you to action, not something that makes you waste your life like a wish does.

Of course, it’s not all about action, either. A dream, a real dream, is bigger than an achievable goal, with step-by-step, time-bound targets. These can be a very valuable part of reaching your dream, but in the people I’ve met, the ones who inspire me, the ones who are kind, generous, honest, exciting, encouraging, and loving; well, the common thread is their dream is something bigger than they can conceivably achieve by themselves. It’s about balancing the action with enjoying the ride – knowing where you’re going, but relishing the journey.

I still don’t really know the answer to the question. I’m working on it – taking my time, getting to know myself, teasing out the threads of my experience and identity until they weave together into a dream that I know is mine. But I’ve changed my motto.

Dream big, or go home.