Making a Living Writing — How I Designed This Life (Part 1 of 5)
This photo is from October 2020, when Mom and I went for a holiday and I told her ‘I want to quit the corporate world in 6 months’. Of course, she laughed it off thinking it’s just a phase.
Imagine you’re in your mid-twenties, and nothing makes sense to you at work. Why are you pulled into all these meetings? What is this race that you don’t know how to win?
It feels strange.
Like a battle between who you are and what is expected from you.
E.g. “I don’t want to be b!tchy for a few brownie points or suck up to a leader. But I probably should?”
It doesn’t feel right if it’s not a part of you, isn’t it?
This is what I felt 3 years ago. And the feeling stayed for way too long.
It kept lingering over my head and weighed me down.
Naturally, I thought I was a lazy millennial who didn’t want to work hard.
Until I realised — Who makes these rules? Who taught us there’s only one way to live and one path to success?
We push people to follow a path, yet applaud the musician or entrepreneur who made it big and made everyone proud. But we won’t tell our kids to follow it, because it’s not ‘certain’.
But what is a certain path anymore?
Since when is one truth applicable to all?
You and I, yes you — reading this, we’re both different.
Yet we have to follow the same path to success, have similar routines, and the metrics for our happiness should be similar too. How does that make any sense when we are both so different with distinctive personalities and strengths?
It’s like our uniqueness is trumped by one notion.
This is what made me think, back then when I was 24 — “In 6 months, I will quit my job and earn way more.” Of course, an inner voice told me it’s a random phase. So did my parents.
In 7 months, it happened.
This is part 1 of my 5-part series on why I quit my job to design my lifestyle, and how I did it.
The reason I’m writing this is because this month I complete 3 years of the time my brain started thinking this way and I acted upon that instinct. This is in the hope of helping somebody out there who’s feeling the same agitation and doesn’t know what to do.
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