The times, they need to start changing.

I need a new start.

This has no relevance to this post whatsoever, but I like it so I'm putting it here anyway. That's just how I roll.

I have no idea what that should be, or look like, or really have even the slightest clue what it should involve. I just know that things have to change.

I've been very adament since turning a certain number that I still don't like to say/type out loud that I still feel young. And I do, in a lot of ways. Unlike most of my friends from university I don't feel the need to settle down or act like an old aged pensioner. I still like to actually go out and enjoy myself and don't think that there's any such thing as being too old to go out and dance and what not. I also love Muppets more than a grown woman should, so that definitely helps keep me young.

But I am feeling like I'm getting too old to still be stuck in a rut, waiting for real grown up life to begin. If anything is going to change, I have to do something about it now before it really is too late and before I really am too old for it.

And whilst there are lots of things that I both want and need to change in my life - my lack of friends and/or social life, my weight, my mental health - it's work that I need to change first, I think.

I've never really understood how some people can just be happy in any old job. How they can be happy just having the security of a paycheck coming in every month, regardless of whether or not the job means anything to them or whether they feel like they're achieving anything in life. I don't mean to sound like I'm judging people like that - I'm not. They just have different priorities to me. Maybe they just care more about their family life and relationships and what not and see a job as just a way to pay the bills. That's fine, but it's just not me. Maybe partly because some part of me has always been aware that I'm not exactly blessed in the friendship/relationship/dealing with people department, but I've always felt like my job would be what I'm about. That I needed a career where I felt fulfilled, that that would be my purpose in life.

And maybe being in a job that is so....not any of those things...is part of what makes me so miserably unhappy with my life. I don't know why I always thought it would be so easy though. I somehow managed to get through a good 20-odd years of my life thinking that being a good student and having a passion for something would be enough. I have no idea where I got this idea from. Although my siblings would contend that I was spoiled because I was the youngest by almost a whole generation, I definitely did not have any sort of priviledged upbringing. My parents are working class, they come from working class backgrounds and we never had much of anything when I was a kid. I was always acutely aware of the value of money, that things didn't come easily and that our family never had the best of luck, so colour me perplexed that I somehow grew up with this fantasy that things would just fall into place and that I'd be some award-winning writer by now.

Maybe fantasy is the key word there - maybe I got too caught up in various fantasies as coping mechanisms throughout my life and didn't want to let go of them and have to view the world as it really was. But that is both a conversation for a therapist, and besides the point right now.

For the point is that I have to do something. I have to take some risks and do some hard things to make a change. I honestly don't know how I will get through the rest of my life like this if I don't. At this point I don't even feel like it's a choice anymore, I feel like it's do or die.

But what to do? I have no idea. I know what I've always wanted to do - write. But how the hell do you make a career out of that? Plenty of people more talented and more driven than me have failed. I'd be happy in some sort of media-ish job that gave me a bit of spare time to write, and that might give me contacts that could one day lead to something, but "some sort of media-ish job" is not very specific. What I'm experienced in is so niche and specialised that it's pretty much impossible to find employment doing the same thing elsewhere.

Pretty much my attitude to life right now.

So what else do I do? Do I re-train in something? And if so, what? And where? I basically want to be Charlie Brooker, but there's no training course in that, sadly. Although if there were, I reckon I'd be a shoe-in. Telly addict? Check. Quite the geek? Check. Miserablist who's never happier than when ranting and complaining about the world and media? Hells to the yeah.

I know that I can't just snap my fingers and immediately change my life. I know that it will take time, and will power, and stamina and that I'll have to face a fair amount of rejection. But if I could just start moving in the right direction, that'd be something. I want to and I feel at least a bit more energized about this than normal, but I genuinely do not know what direction I need to be moving in. I have no idea how to get to where I want to go, and no idea how to find out.

I mean if I want to be a writer, does that mean that I want to go into journalism? I entertained the notion of being a reporter for a brief time in my early teens, but that was mostly a desire to be Lois Lane, I think. I'd love to write blog/column/opinion type pieces (much the way Brooker does - you see a pattern here?) but I don't know if journalism is necessarily the right way into that, especially as I wouldn't be either that good at or interested in news reporting.

So should I just keep writing in my spare time, maybe take whatever part-time writing courses I can find the time and money for and accept having a less than stellar, but still vaguely related media job? Ok, but what should that job be? There is a job that I want, and it's one that I've applied for recently, but it's also the sort of job that probably several thousand other people applied for so my chances are somewhere around slim to none. And it's also the kind of job that hardly ever comes along.

Keep your fingers crossed for me, internetz.

 
I guess all I can do for now is just keep looking, keep trying to think of new things to look for/places to look for something that might vaguely fit me, and keep writing. I've definitely been falling behind with writing over the last while. It's a big ask sometimes to overcome the inertia, the exhaustion, the pissed-off-at-the-world-and-everything-in-it-ness, but I sure as hell won't get anywhere if I don't try. So while I may not have all the answers, or even the right questions at the minute, I can at least write.