I’m jealous of those people who know what they want to be when they grow up. Even more so if they’ve always known. At age 6, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was “a horse.” By the time I finished high school, I wasn’t much better prepared for the world.<\/p>\n
I took the scenic route through college, so it took me a bit longer than most to graduate. I was 25 when I graduated with a BS in Physics, and still I had zero idea what I wanted to do with my life. I sort of fell into a job as a network administrator for a small security company. I stayed there for a couple of years and then started working for local government. Over the years, my responsibilities here have changed.<\/p>\n
During my tenure here, I’ve had some times when I detested my job so much that it made me depressed. As part of our employee assistance program, I was able to see a career counselor. She gave me a litany of tests in order to determine what field might be proper for me.<\/p>\n
After several weeks of tests and exercises, the results came back. According to my personality and temperament, I should be an artist. I do like to make things. I’ve always considered myself more of a “crafter” than an “artist”. I didn’t make anything that I considered “art”. I knitted a bit, sewed, and did other general “crafty” things. I believed that there was no way that I could support myself as an artist. I declared that I was entirely too addicted to eating and having a roof over my head to consider a career as an artist.<\/p>\n
My counselor told me something that has come to be my motto. If I couldn’t be an artist as my career, I needed to create things in my spare time to feed that need or else I would forever be unhappy. It’s absolutely true. When I get super depressed, I can look back at the last few weeks and will realize that I’ve not made anything. All I have to do is pick up a project and make a little progress on it and my happiness returns. Or I can take an art class. I just have to give my brain something creative to work on.<\/p>\n
These days, I call myself “craftmaster” of my own tiny label. I still dabble with many different mediums, expert at none, but I am beginning to see myself as an artist. I am not an “Artist”, but definitely an “artist”.<\/p>\n
I still don’t know what I want to be “when I grow up”. But I know more about myself and what it takes to make me happy. That matters more than what I do to pay the bills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m jealous of those people who know what they want to be when they grow up. Even more so if they’ve always known. At age 6, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was “a horse.” By the time I finished high school, I wasn’t much better prepared for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258,"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions\/258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}