I missed yesterday’s 31 Day Blog Challenge post because I’ve had a really long week dealing with a family emergency, but I have a few minutes now so I want to get this one up. After saying that I was going to follow through with the challenge, I don’t want you to think that I gave up already! Today’s prompt is: What is Your Dream Job? Like the other posts so far, it seems like such a simple question on the surface, but nothing is ever that simple with me!

The Journey to My Dream Job

For years, I had no idea what my dream job really was. I majored in a lot of different subjects, and have accumulated more credits than most people have for two Bachelor’s degrees, but not enough  in a specific subject to even count as an associates degree! When I was a teenager, I wanted to be an archeologist, but my guidance counselor told me I’d never find work in that field.

I went to college to become a high school English teacher, but failed out after one semester because I was more interested in partying than studying. I moved back home and went to community college, where I managed to maintain about a 3.8GPA. I majored in English, Communications, Journalism, Nursing, and General Education (because at some point I decided to just take classes that appealed to me without taking the ones that didn’t).

My “Ah ha!” Moment

I’ve been writing since I was about 14. That’s over two decades now. When I was a teenager, I used to write insanely depressing fiction, mostly because I was an insanely depressed kid. In college, I was one of those girls who wrote papers for extra credit. I managed to pass geography simply because I wrote a stellar paper on how the Egyptians relied on the Nile for survival. I failed at least half my tests, but that paper saved my butt.

After I left nursing school, then shortly after, left my ex, I finally started trying to make a living writing. I had applied for hundreds of jobs in my area, but since I don’t have  degree and no real skills that translate well to a resume, I didn’t even manage to get an interview, let alone a job. I was running out of money and trying to raise Jacob, who was three at the time. I found an ad online for a content mill and started writing for them. I’ve written for a few of those types of sites, and while I didn’t particularly enjoy it, it paid the bills.

Living my dream job

After one of the sites stopped offering regular work and another completely reformatting to the point where they didn’t need as many writers, I was basically once again facing unemployment. I started Pretty Opinionated because I figured if I worked my butt off, maybe it would actually pay the bills one day. Also, because after writing for content mills, I really needed to use my voice again.

Through my site, I networked with other bloggers, stepped outside my shell and developed new friendships. Those friendships led to my dream job- writing for my site and another site that I can be equally as proud of. The work I do over at Our Family World lets me flex my health-writing muscles in a way that never quite fit in here at Pretty Opinionated. Basically, I’m already well on my way to living my dream job.

If I could spend the rest of my career writing for myself and for sites that I love as much as my own, my work life will be pretty fantastic! Writing lets me live out all my other dream jobs, from archeologist to epidemiologist to volcanologist (all possible contenders on my list of dream jobs), without ever leaving my home, being exposed to Ebola, or, you know, falling to my fiery death- because you know klutzy me would trip right into the opening of an active volcano!