I got job today. Well, not today, but today is my first day. It’s minimal wage, and only for two hours a day, because I can’t go full time until I get me a first class degree, but its something.
I still feel like a failure though.
My husband pointed out that I have been running an online business for two years and not even scratching the surface of a liveable income. He is right. He reckons I have no gumption and spend more time and effort making excuses rather than doing anything productive with my life.
‘Where’s that book you said you were writing?’
‘Um, I’m writing it.’
‘Where’s that translation company you wanted to set up?’
‘Well I am studying a full time course, you know!’
‘You could stop your tuition that pays you peanuts and start your company, but no, you just have excuses, always excuses, and I am so sick of it.’
He is sick of it. I am sick of it. He is sick of me. He is also sick, which doesn’t help his frustration. I made him so many cups of tea and tucked him up in bed and brought him all his meals and made sure he was warm and comfortable in a clean and tidy environment. He is so cold to me though lately. It hurts me a lot, but I don’t have time to mull over it or confront him about it because I have all these assignments and now the job and in between that and chauffeuring my brothers to school I don’t have any time to talk to him.
I don’t blame him, really.
I’m upset, though. I know these things bother him a lot. They bother me too. Maybe it’s tough love.
I know we are at very different stages of life at the moment; he is a successful automotive engineer full of ideas for the future, liasing with other engineers about how to make software to promote the green lifestyle etc etc. He is innovative and hard working and aspirational. I am still studying full time. And he is right. If I spent more effort chasing my dreams, I would have made something of myself by now.
‘You’re 22,’ he said, ‘what do you have to show for it?’
Nothing.
My mum would say I have a driving license, I have an online business (which pays me peanuts), I’m working towards a degree, I bought a car. But those are things all adults should work for. If I didn’t have any of those things, given the opportunities I have in life, I would really be a failure.
I don’t have a real degree. Yet. My business is not at its full potential, and I could have made it so, had I worked hard enough. I have been writing a novel since I was eleven years old. When Christopher Paolini published Eragon at age 15, I thought, ‘I’m gonna publish mine by the time I’m fourteen.’
Did I? I’m 22 now. Did I? No.
So I feel like a failure. I keep doing this. I keep saying things and talking the talk but not walking the walk.
But all is not lost. I have been 22 for thirteen days. I still have 352 days left.
Photograph of Venice
Ocean Bream 