The So-Called Turning Point

Five years ago, I made a decision to enter the job market with a dream of having a high-powered career. You know, the kind of career that involves working for a national/multinational company in a cubicle in a high-rise building with a mean boss you can nickname and double-digit-million monthly income. Well, besides the double-digit stuff, I could say that everything went on track.

The first job I landed? It was good. Perhaps, it was even better than the latter job. I was working for a middle-sized national company with an annoying-but-fun boss, great working environment, and a career path. The one thing it lacked was the fact that I wasn’t working in the financial sector.

At this point, I should be clear to you that I didn’t only crave for a high-powered career; I craved for high-powered career IN FINANCE. I was so fed up with an image of investment dealers fighting over invisible stuff to buy. Sometimes, the image switched to a financial analyst working in front of colorful charts and talking fancy words that no normal human being could understand. Oh, anything could do as long as it was in financial sector!

Then, I got into my last job: a fast-track career on a commercial bank. It should have satisfied me enough, don’t you think? But, no, it did not. I began with a high spirit that I could get a place on treasury department. I just didn’t realize that getting there was going to be a long and painful journey where you had to lose yourself to become this whole new identity: a banker. In the end, I couldn’t embrace the identity, no matter how hard I tried; no matter how much I sacrificed.

Everything inside me refused to be what “I” wanted to be. Everything around me felt wrong and I became desperately unhappy. Somehow the salary became unsatisfying, the work environment became too hostile, the boss became too mean, and the work became too burdening. It seemed easy to blame the job, while the truth is, it was all my fault.

I was at fault for thinking that the finance career was “my” dream. It was not. Up until now, I’m not sure whose it was, but I can tell you that it was someone else’s dream that somehow caught up in my head. My head, but not my heart. Oh, you must be sick of my dead romantic attitude. Just consider it a character flaw.

Now, you must be wanting to know what my dream really is. Well, this is the seventh paragraph and I bet you’re starting to sick to read all my ramblings, so it’s about time already. Here it is: I want to write. I like to write; I always do. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a journalist. In school, I never liked multiple choice tests; I rocked essay tests. I could make my answers as short as a tweet or as long as a memoir.  I wrote poems, stories, and fanfictions – well, before my computer got broken and everything was erased from the hard drive. In fact, right after I graduated university, I was looking for a chance to get a screenwriting scholarship. I never told anyone that. The thing is, I wasn’t confident enough to show people what I wrote and tell them that I wanted to be a writer. I was too afraid that people will laugh at it and say that it was not a “real job”.

So, I quit my last job. The not-so-high-paying-but-look-glamorous-enough-so-you-have-something-to-be-proud-about-when-telling-your-friends-and-family job. I might be telling people that I quit being a full-time housewife, but no, that didn’t work out – more on that later. Now, I’m in a haze. I know I want to write, but I’m realistic enough that I need something to keep food in my stomach. That means, I need to get a freelance job or business that will be enough to feed me, but also leave me a time to write, a mind to fantasize, and a life to actually be lived. It’s okay, I’ll work on that.

I’m aware that TV series are not real, but why should a childhood dream be silly? I might not possess a flawless grammatical skill; I might not be the one with the excellent vocabularies; I might not create the mind-blowing sentence logic, but I want to write. And I have lived my life enough to HAVE things to write. So be it. Bring it on, life.