Weekly digs 6: There is no such thing as a dream job

Notes from a former florist

Source unknown

If you have ever thought to yourself… “I should quit my job and become a florist,” let me tell you why you might not want to give that two-week notice.

For the first time since resigning as a florist, I bought flowers to make an arrangement this week.

How do you go back to something that started as a hobby and became a “dream job” (not necessarily my dream job) and then turned into a reality check that there is no such thing as a dream job?

If you really want to quit your job to become a florist here is what you should know:

• Your days are spent mostly cleaning, providing customer service, working retail hours with retail responsibilities

• When you are making flowers, they aren’t always an expression of your own creativity or vision but rather an execution of someone else’s

• Just because people work in a flower shop doesn’t mean they are always pleasant to work with (workplace issues arise in all types of workplaces)

• Work is still work, no matter what you are doing or how beautiful the production of that labor may be

All over social media, I see people saying they want to quit their 9-5 to become a florist.

It’s funny because I took my job as a florist while waiting for my 9-5 (and by waiting, I mean drowning in the abyss of my job search).

D- Doing

Re-imagining the life and career, I thought I would have. (& Doing it publicly?)

It’s hard as a gen-z over-sharer in the digital age not to feel weary of starting over, pivoting, or just simply changing your mind.

Almost 2 years ago, I posted a picture in a cap and gown at my graduation ceremony after earning my Master's in Museum Studies. Two years later, I never landed the 9-5 job in my field.

When every pivot, turn, and experience is documented with a digital footprint, it’s awkward to change your mind, take a non-linear career path, or explain choices you made for your future before you had a fully formed frontal lobe!

To catch up my digital footprint with my current reality, here is what I have been up to since then:

1. Grieving the loss of a museum career post-graduation (grief of employment loss is real, and it comes in all forms)

2. Quitting the “dream job” of being a florist because it was not actually all that fulfilling

3. Leaping into creating my own copywriting studio and taking my copywriting seriously as a career for the first time in my 6 years of professional writing

4. Doing the scary thing of announcing this publicly (adding another career notch to my public footprint)

I- Interested In

New things, and old things again.

And by this, I mean writing. If you know me then you know I have always been a writer.

It was probably my first dream job. Filling notebooks with nothing but scribbles before I could string together letters into words and words into sentences.

Hindsight is 20/20. Writing jobs found me more often than I found them, and they were always my crutch to fall back on.

With hindsight, I might have chosen a few things differently, avoided a few missteps (public and private), and taken a shorter path to where I am now.

G- Getting

Over it!

I am finally getting over my post-grad expectations and broken promises.

It is easy to do this when you’re finding success at what you are doing, but it’s also easier when you stop worrying so much about how the outside world perceives your choices.

This is not the “Let Them” theory. This is just getting over the fact that adults might wince if you say you’re a freelancer or that you work for yourself, friends might have more money for summer trips this year than you do, someone might get a promotion at a job they hate while you are grinding at a job you love. JUST GET OVER IT.

Not to be harsh, I mean literally imagine yourself putting one foot in front of the other until you are over it, and that is exactly where you will find yourself.

S- Suggesting

We find our purpose and worth outside of our careers. Crazy I know!

But maybe then, when we stumble or pivot, we don’t feel shame or let down. Instead, we feel secure in who we are and how we live outside of our means of making money, and dare I say, value those things as currency higher than money.