Be Yourself: Let Everyone See Who You Want to be!

For too long, I have taken bad advice from other people. Too often do I work hard to please other people rather than myself. As I look back on some of the advice I’ve gotten over the years:

If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress. – Barack Obama

• I was once told not to marry my husband because he wasn’t “husband material”. The person who gave me that advice is now divorced. I don’t think she’d have much luck in writing for a “successful relationships” column.
• I have been told what career paths I need to take: I started school as an Early Childhood Educator. It landed me a miserable job that I hated. I was told, maybe my career should be in the medical field. They make good money. I changed my major and tried Medical Assisting. I didn’t fit there. I tried again for nursing, then radiology. Where has that left me? With student loans and no degree to show for it.
• I have heard “Do you know what you need to do?” and “Here’s what you should do”.

And now I’m ready to be the person I was meant to be.

Before I became a mother, I had no idea where I fit in. I would convince myself that becoming a nurse or working in the health care field would be awesome because I love people and I love helping them. But that wasn’t God’s plan for me. Then, I convinced I wanted to be a preschool teacher because I loved kids. But, when I got the job as an assistant teacher, I felt like a horrible parent because I was leaving my own child to take care of someone else’s. I love kids, of course. But I love my own kids better.

I got pregnant when I was 18 years old, 5 months before I graduated high school. My husband (we got married when I was 8 months pregnant) and I struggled for a very long time, moving in and out of my mom’s house, suffering from unemployment in what seemed like a dead end life.

I remember specifically one time, when I was pregnant with our youngest we still didn’t have jobs, I had five dollars on the kitchen table and I was wondering if I was going to use that to pay the gas bill, the electric bill, or buy diapers for our daughter. All I could do was hold my precious baby and take in her sweet smell.

That’s when I decided I wasn’t waiting around for any more advice. No one else was going to live vicariously through me or put me through things they didn’t have the chance to make their own children do.

My calling was to be a writer. I knew that deep down inside of me when I was in the 4th grade and began writing poems. Horrible poems actually, but the way I felt when my pencil hit the paper was indescribable. I pushed back my own wants and needs and desires and calling for everyone else’s.

I sucked up my depression, borrowed money from my mom (again) to pay for the bills and buy diapers and food and I began to write. Some nights I would dish out four or five articles, like I was making up for lost time. I found a job as a press release writer and for now that’s my main source of income. I have also found an unbelievable respect for marketing, and my husband and I enrolled at Post University for Bachelor of Science in Marketing, and one day we would like to own our own business as marketing consultants.

I am not where I want to be in my writing career, but I’m not doing anymore side missions or jumping any other paths until I feel like I am successful in the shoes that God put me in. Writing is not a gift. But it’s a talent I understand very well.

My homework for my self this week is to create a PLAN – and I will share that with you when I am finished.