Telling My Story Part 2
This is the back door to my blog. The stories shared here are only accessible through the Who I Am linkup.
When I received Dana's email with the theme of LOVE and asking the questions, "Who is this for? What do you want them to know about you? How do the small pieces fit together to create the amazing individual that is YOU?", the next part of my story fell in perfectly.
Though I'm not actually sure who it's for yet, so I'm counting on your feedback!
Falling for Love
After I went buck wild at the age of 19 for a solid year, I actually settled down. I worked as if my life depended on it. I always strived to get out of my current job to get promoted into another one and make more money and I always wrestled with the idea that I should be doing something else.
I let society dictate what I was going to do with my life. I started dating someone who everyone thought was the perfect person for me. People thought we were going to get married. I thought we were going to get married. I settled for love instead of falling for it.
An idea came out of cutting my little brothers hair that perhaps I could be a barber. It wasn’t quite on a whim. I thought I was strategically planning my future. Once my boyfriend graduated from college, he would be in line for a promotion on his job. He would possibly be relocated, so I wanted to make sure I was set up to be portable as well. I was going to do hair, wherever we lived, when we got married.
I enrolled into Cosmetology school because they had a night course; the barbering school did not. I still needed to work full-time. My long days were a sacrifice for a 22-year-old trying to find her way. While I was in cosmetology school my boyfriend graduated from college. By the time I graduated from Cosmetology school, passed the State Board test and was doing hair part-time, the love I had settled for fizzled out. He had relocated and everyone was devastated that our relationship was over.
I was more devastated that I was now in my second career, another position in life that I had settled for. I had invested three years in a relationship and half of that getting trained in a career that I didn't like. Thoughts returned to my purpose in life.
I wondered if I would figure it out when I got married to the right man. Later I would wonder if I would figure it out when I became a mom.
When I met my husband, I was still working at my full-time job, I was going to college two nights a week, doing hair three nights a week and on Saturday's. If and when my husband asked what my hobbies were, I know I didn’t say anything about writing. It was probably around this point in my life that I became an “in the closet” writer. I was 24 years old, still living at home, paying off my car AND my “establishing credit” debt.
I couldn’t see a future in writing unless it was a book and I just didn’t have one in me at the time.
I would like to go back and tell myself not to build my future on someone else's foundation, and don’t settle for love, fall for it.
Fall for love, life and what you do because your future depends on it. You will never truly be happy if you settle for anything.