Dreams

We've all imagined how our lives would turn out. Well, I know I have. Personally I've spent many hours day dreaming about how I'll be rich, or I'll be an adventurer, or how I'll just live in a small house with millions of cats, or even that I'll finally learn to travel through time and live with the dinosaurs.  The problem is, until I get up off of my lazy tush, they're just dreams. How many people out there actually end up doing the thing they dreamed of their entire lives? Or better yet, have a job that actually fits with what they went to school for?

I've often heard stories of people who dreamed of becoming this or that but somehow they ended up on a different path. Now, the path they ended up on worked out for them, they are happy. But, when hearing the stories, peeking out from behind their eyes is a look of disappointment and hope. They wish they would have gone after their dreams, and maybe part of them still has hope that things will work out the way they had always imagined. 

Almost two months ago, I got a call for a job interview. It wasn't an ideal job. I'd be driving 40 minutes to and from each day, working little hours, and it wasn't anything spectacular or glamorous. But after spending hours applying for jobs, I was happy to finally have an interview. And I thought my parents would have the same feeling. They were happy, but my dad sat me down for a "lecture" that night. 

Dad explained to me that I have options. I needed to decide if I wanted a job, or if I wanted to work towards a career and get on a path. He wasn't lecturing, more like guiding in a loving way, letting me know that no matter what I did with my life, he would still support me. The problem was that I didn't know what kind of path I wanted to be on. All I knew was that I needed money and I needed to be doing SOMETHING with my time.

I went in for the interview with a pessimistic attitude. Not in the sense that I wouldn't get the job, but in the sense that I would get the job and not know what to do about it. I'm not one who likes making decisions. Before I talked to my dad, whether I took the job relied solely on whether or not they gave it to me. But he pointed out that I have to, at some point, decide what I want to do with my life and that I should try harder to take a job that has some relation to some thing I may be somewhat interested in someday.

I had two interviews. Both started out with the interviewer giving me a brief history of their experience with the store. The first one said she had gotten a job after going to a little bit of college and has stuck with it for two years. The second had been there many years and was now a single mother. I realized I didn't want to be sucked into that trap. The trap of sticking with something just for the security of it.

I drove home with a determination to make my dreams come true. Even if I'm not sure what they are yet, I'm going to find out and I'm not going to give up. I don't want to be an old cat lady luring strangers into my home to talk about how I could have been something. Because I can be something now. The only thing standing in my way is me.