Purpose seeking

Finding your purpose can be a lifelong quest. I’m not sure I’ve found mine yet but I’ve whittled away a few things that I’m pretty sure are not it. One school of thought, if you want to bring your purpose into your life (not sure if this is even possible), is to dig back to when you were young and remember what you were most interested in. The things you were passionate about back then could lead you to your next career or job. Can you get paid to read?!

The very first thing I can remember being passionate about was books. At one point I scoured our home from top to bottom and collected any book that peaked my interest and brought them to the enclosed porch off my bedroom. I had a rather large sliding door bookcase and I made that room into a library. I carefully and patiently created pockets and library checkout slips for every single book and marked them according to my own system (I don’t think I was up on the Dewey Decimal system yet). I set up a small desk, convinced my mom to buy me a date stamper and like magic, I was a librarian. I clearly remember I irritated several family members who wanted to reclaim their books without having to check them out.

As the years went on, my new passion became clothing. Through eighth grade I wore a uniform and was subject to the hand-me-downs from two of my older cousins. One of my best friends had the coolest clothes and the coolest mom who took her shopping a lot. I wanted my own new clothes badly and begged my mom to buy me a pair of jeans, specifically Levi jeans like my friend. She ended up buying me Wranglers. This was probably one of the worst things that had happened to me up to this point in my young life. I refused to wear the Wranglers.

Finally, before entering high school, my mom relented and took me clothes shopping for my very own clothes (uniforms were no longer required). I was immediately hooked on the sensation of choosing my own style and I ran with it. Whenever I had money to spare, I was conflicted whether to spend it on clothes or books but since I’d discovered the library, clothes generally won out. I used our very first computer system, a Commodore 64, to catalog my closet contents and track what I wore each day so that I wouldn’t duplicate anything.

So when it finally came to college I thought of all the things I wanted to do in life. Design clothes? I’m not an artist. Become a librarian? It didn’t sound very exciting. Interior design and cooking were also careers I considered. By the time I filled out the interest sheet to include with my high school yearbook I was either going to be an interior designer (Endicott College) or a chef (Johnson and Wales). I did neither and instead entered college with the idea of becoming a teacher which lasted two semesters. I definitely was not meant to be a teacher.

After going through my earlier memories to find a way to pivot something into a new career/passion, I started watching YouTube over the past several months, specifically fashion related videos and thought maybe I could do something with that. There are all sorts of channels by women who unbox subscription boxes (StitchFix and the like) so I decided to give it a whirl. How hard could it be?

Stay tuned.

MC