What do you do when you wake up one day and realize that everything you have been working towards in your career isnât what you want anymore? Well I canât speak for anyone else⊠But when youâre me, you write about it.
For as long as I can remember I have loved music, theatre and film. The storytelling, the drama, the passion was like oxygen to me. I couldnât get enough. As a child I would put on plays or showcases for my friends and family. Ever since childhood I have lived life in a state of constant daydream⊠always fantasizing outcomes, adventures or alternate endings for any situation. I would write stories and play out entire sagas, all in my imagination, casting those around me in the various roles and act out songs as if the lyrics had sprung directly from my own soul.
I joined the choir in primary school and was desperate to be involved in all the school productions. In high school I was always singing or dancing⊠In the common room at lunch whether it was recreating âA whole new worldâ with the cute boy from my year or having dance offs with my girlfriends. During study breaks I would lead my group in mass sing-a-longs and at times I was even caught un-knowingly singing to myself while doing book work in math class. I joined Drama which I adored but struggled with the live performances, which I now know was due to my high social anxiety levels. Behind the scenes was where I really excelled⊠Organizing my groups performances and often writing entire scripts rather than just the scene or two that was required of me. With my best friends help, we put together an entire performance in our senior year for the school showcase. It was a grand scale, over-the-top, 3 and a half minute Broadway style production sprung entirely from our imaginations while listening to an old song one afternoon at her house. Iâm talking boys in top hats and tails, Showgirls, Geishas and Marilyn Monroes all dancing together⊠Such an incredible moment to see our vision come alive on the stage!Â
When high school ended however, I was at a loss⊠Aside from an apparent gift I had demonstrated for writing there was nothing I had particularly excelled at in high school. I was fascinated with people and the motives behind their actions and so considered carrying on to study psychology however as I had failed to gain enough academic achievements during my final year, university wasnât an immediate option for me and honestly I wasnât ready for it. So I decided to take a gap year and jumped full time into the world of hospitality.
The hospitality lifestyle was a dream at first⊠I learned a lot about food and wine culture (especially the wine!) while providing me with the perfect platform to help me get over my shyness with strangers, something that would in turn help me to manage my Anxiety in the years to follow. Front of house service came naturally to me and for a girl that was used to being the black sheep in any situation it was a great feeling to have finally found a place where I fit in. I made friends easily and unexpectedly found something that I both enjoyed and appeared to be good at. One year turned into another. Followed by another, and another. Soon my passion for storytelling was forgotten and replaced with something else.
I wanted to continue on with the momentum I had found and after a few years of hard work my dedication manifested itself in success and I was made the Venue Manager of my very own nightclub. I could barely believe it. How had the shy, insecure little girl who was never good enough, managed to make it here? I was drunk on my own success⊠So much so I forgot all my other passions, both essential and unhealthy. I stopped partying and going out. I stopped going to live music and losing myself in the magic of the atmosphere. I stopped seeing my friends and celebrating their achievements with them. I stopped writing. I did nothing but work hard to make that bar a success. I lived for that place, day and night. I was pulling 70hr weeks and when I wasnât working I was brainstorming ways to improve the business. For almost four years that place had my heart and soul. Yet still, I felt something was missing. No matter how hard I worked or how many successes I had, it wasnât enough. I wasnât fulfilled. The only thing I can liken it to would perhaps be the feeling of living out someone elseâs dream, like the son that goes to law school because his father went to law school, but really he dreams of being an artist. Except I wasnât living out someone elseâs dream⊠I had denied myself my own dreams for no other reason than I was afraid of failure. I didnât want to let my parents down so when I finally found something I could do well easily enough, I stuck with it.
The day did come though when I knew that I was no longer being challenged. Id grown bored, comfortable and I worried I was losing my passion so I decided to see what else the industry had to teach me and sought inspiration in other hospitality endeavours. However, everything I found that started off as a diamond, lost its sparkle after a few months. I couldnât figure out what was wrong at first, and it wasnât until I ended up in a job I hated going to that I realized what the problem was. It wasnât that I had lost the passion, it was that my true passion didnât lie there in the first place. I always used to say âFake it âtill you make it!â as kind of an inside joke in reference to what living life with Depression and Anxiety was like, but the truth was thatâs exactly what I had been doing⊠Faking it; and in doing so, all Iâd made, was my real dreams disappear.
So what now? I couldnât start afresh. At twenty-eight years old with thirteen years of experience spread across the hospitality industry it was too late to change my course now. Too much time has passed. Iâm too old. Iâm canât do anything else. Iâm. Not. Good. Enough. These thoughts and more circled my mind. Old insecurities spinning familiar lies in my head⊠and I believed them until the other day when something inspiring popped up on my news feed that gave me hope and opened my mind to a different way of thinking.
Oprah was fired from her first reporting job at a TV station at twenty-three years old for being âun-suitable for Televisionâ and went on to become one of the biggest television personalities in history. At the age of twenty-four Stephen King was working as a janitor and living in a trailer. Vincent Van Gogh decided to go to art school at the age of twenty-seven after failing as a missionary. At the age of twenty-eight, J.K. Rowling was a suicidal single parent living on welfare. At age thirty, Harrison Ford and Martha Stewart were a carpenter and a stock broker, respectively. At forty years old Vera Wang, having failed to make the Olympic figure skating team and after losing out on the Editor-in-Chief position at Vogue, decided to design her first dress and Alan Rickman gave up his graphic design career to pursue acting at forty-two.
And there were so many more⊠On and on I read. Failure story after failure story of all of these well-known and successful people who had refused to let their failures define them and instead decided to keep going, followed their hearts and found their calling in life. Thatâs when I realized all I needed to do was re-write my dreams and for the first time I really knew what I wanted to do. It had been staring me in the face my entire life. I wasnât going to be a bar owner. I donât want to spend my life babysitting drunk people and taking orders from the guy who had never worked in hospitality but decided one day âHey, Letâs open a nightclub!â I want to make people laugh, and cry, and feel. I donât want to waste my days and nights making other peoples dreams come true while my own sit in a long forgotten corner of the attic covered in cobwebs. I owe it to that little girl full of hope who used to believe in magic and dream that life was a musical. I owe it to the awkward teenager who was too shy to let everyone see how bright her star shone. I owe it to the young woman taking her first steps in the world who was too scared to take a leap of faith. I owe it to me.
The point of this whole blog was about growing up and changing for the better. Itâs funny that when I started it I didnât even realize exactly what that meant.
This is my story and Iâm re-writing it, one chapter at a time.
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