Hey, all! Been a long time, no? I’d just had to deal with a lot of stuff the past few months, I won’t even try to go into any of it. But I’m here and I feel like sharing some thoughts so…
Yeah, it’s about that expression we all know and understand and relate to which I’ve now used as a title for this post. I’m writing about this now because I have been thrust into yet another challenging life event. One that I have no idea of what to do and yet here I am, pushing to make it work. Seems like I’ve been doing this my whole life–getting myself educated along the way.
Pre-college, I had no clear path of where I wanted to go. Some kids my age then knew they wanted to be a doctor, or a pilot, or a model, or a teacher. I maybe wanted to be a singer or actress. At one point I thought I wanted to be a scientist or an astronaut. But I graduated from high school and was getting ready to finalize my college application…and I still didn’t know what course to enroll in.
Whatever, I went ahead and got myself a Tourism degree. Not the most exciting choice but it’s a degree (from one of the, if not THE, top universities in the Philippines) nonetheless and would be an asset when it came time to apply for a job.
I would later find out wouldn’t have mattered what I majored in for as long as my career wasn’t any one of the technical or science diciplines.
Anyway, again (for the nth time) having no clear career path that I wanted to carve for myself, I just sent job applications here and there. When I was accepted, I stayed a few months, a year, three years, six or seven years. I was working in a field that would define my professional career–marketing and public relations. In between and while I was doing my stuff, I also discovered fiction writing, and maybe stuff about acting and using theater as a tool for classroom education.
Through all those years, after all the experience, I never became an expert in anything. I mean, I can do things–sing, act, dance, write–but not exceptionally well. In retrospect, maybe I should have gone to a special arts school to hone those talents back in college but formal art education wasn’t something I had the permission to indulge in.
As an employee, I would say I accomplished what I needed to accomplish with just enough effort to not get fired. Well, maybe not just enough. Maybe most of the time I also pushed myself to be good enough to be recognized for my efforts. But I never reached the level of a visionary with a capacity to develop grand plans for a company’s future.
When I arrived here in the US, I knew I would continue to add on to this hodgepodge of abilities without being an expert in any of them. And guess what? It’s starting again. I’ve just been accepted as an accounts payable staff for a freight company. I mean, I have avoided anything to do with accounting for almost forever and yet, I am caught up in numbers and terminologies such as balance sheets, debit, credit and such.
So goes the saga of my life. Of my many attempts to bloom where I am planted, adding one more feather to my multi-faceted, multi-colored cap. And because I also believe that wherever I am, I am where I’m supposed to be, I can’t complain. I am making a life for myself, I am accomplishing things, maybe not my dreams but still…I shall bloom and be the prettiest flower I can be.
