Jack of all trades, master of none…and that’s okay.
Feeling Myself
In this little moment I had waiting for the train to Nice, I started to realise I’m so lucky to be me.
STORY TIME! Hey everyone, so I wanted to talk about my struggle with finding my “purpose” and finding my dream job/career. As told in a previous post, I tell you about me first quitting and then losing my survival job. Well here is the full backstory as to how I ended up where I am, and is a little bit of a rant. Grab a cup of tea or coffee and some snacks!
Growing up I had so many life plans! My dream careers included becoming a gymnast, historian, archaeologist, marine biologist, oceanographer, a performer, and anthropologist, and of course a magical mermaid princess.. I had it all figured out. I had that “ this is what I want to do with my life”moment with all of those career paths. Obviously, I learned quickly that me turning into a magical mermaid princess could only fully happen in my imagination ( and yes I will be buying a mono fin soon). But the other careers I did actually try to pursue. I started with the gymnast/cheerleader sports route and a little bit of the performer route for my outside of school dreams. Within school, I was leaning towards marinebiologist as the “this will be my actual ‘parents can be proud of me’ career”. I was good at all of these things but not great enough.
For being a marine biologist my math skills were (and still are) horrible. I would just barely pass math classes, and would have my school teachers and consolers, repetitively tell me that I would never be good in math and that I shouldn’t go for a career in the sciences. I was so devastated in hearing this that my advanced placement (AP) biology/science grades, which were fine, started to go down as well. All I probably needed at the time was someone to sit me down and tutor me in math. But instead I just got told over and over again, to find something else. Left to my own thoughts I would have shifted to investing myself down the historian/anthropologist type route, for which I was also being placed in more advanced classes. Instead I choose the performing arts. Why? Because everyone would tell me how good I was at it, even though I fully doubted my abilities to be great at the performing arts, it was something that I did love to do, and I knew people could have a career in it so I said “Sure, why not?”, and tossed myself into it.
After having my dreams crushed in high school. I went on to college with the intention to become a drama or music teacher. Well my fear of music theory, which reminded me of my struggles in math, kept me from the music teacher route. So I fully focused on the theatre. I felt myself onstage and it was fun. The classes truly made me look within myself to further my craft, but they were also slowly revealing to me that I wanted more from life, then the rat race of the actor life. But I would quickly ignore that part of myself to further focus on theatre. The ideal of teaching fell to the back burner for awhile as I shifted fully to having a performance degree, only to add it back on towards the end of my studies as a fall back.
The whole time I was in school for theatre, my mind was consistently telling me I should be doing those other careers that I had “failed at”too. I had felt equally as excited and challenged in my humanities and anthropology courses, as I was in my theatre courses. Although tempted many times to add those career paths as minors to my degree, I kept telling myself it was a distraction. I continued theatre even though my anxiety was also holding me back in excelling at that as well.
Fast forwarding to my move to NYC, where I was supposed to finally be able to put my “dream” career of being a broadway star into motion. The hustle of having horrible “survival jobs” that barely helped you survive anything. The never having enough money or time to make money. All money made goes straight to the rent. All time spent at work to have no time to go on auditions or enough money to pay for lessons and dance class. It was exhausting. ( just like reading those sentence!) That was not part of the dream. I was literally going in circles, like a hamster, and it made me start to think that maybe this isn’t for me. New York City was amazing! The people, the cultures, the city, I did fall in love with it all, I even found the love of my life there. The only thing I didn’t love was the struggle. The rat race. Some how with all this happening to me I still held on to this notion that I needed to succeed at theatre and only theatre. The move to The Netherlands did not help in this “furthering of my theatre career”, in fact it brought my slow moving train to a complete stop. I again was not doing anything theatre related and only looking for survival jobs.
The extreme down time with no work I had because of visa issues at the start of my move here and the down time during the pandemic lockdowns, along with my growing distain for working retail jobs, brought back my other passions into my minds eye.
Here I am now. It took losing a job that I didn’t even care that much about and a whole global pandemic to realise that my societal upbringing had actually hindered me from unlocking my full potential ( and happiness), exploring the things that I actually liked to do, and kind of ruined another one by making me feel that I could only do that one thing. I was just living for work instead of working to live. I’m learning that life is meant to be lived and enjoyed. I shouldn’t have been trying to turn my passions into careers I should just be allowed to explore them and if one happens to bring me money, then yay!
I titled this '“jack of all trades, master of none”, because every time I heard this saying it was always with the view that being a the “Jack” is bad and that you need to master something in order to be successful. This is false. It is okay to be average.
Now, I am still trying on this path that hopefully allows me to thrive in the Dutch theatre scene. But if for some reason it doesn't work out and it seems that I was not great enough at it by someone else’s standard, I now know that I will be okay. I know that I have so many unexplored aspects of my being, that I can try other paths; and that my so called “failures” are lessons learned, journeys completed, and starting points for a new path.
