The Long, Winding Road (Part 1 of ?)

I don’t know if I have ever shared publicly why I decided to completely change careers, aside from the meta reason of wanting to be happy. I also dovetails into why I do so many projects, why I work as much as I do, why I have a Patreon, etc. So maybe I should.

Here goes.

I fell in love with video production in high school. I took two years of the classes available to us at Shawnee High School back in the 90s, back in the dark time before non-linear editing with analog tapes was the standard, and something just clicked with me. I knew that this was something I wanted to do.

I went to La Salle University based on this desire to do video editing and video production, but something happened along the way. I’m not sure what, but I stopped pursuing it as aggressively. I was bitten by the writing bug, and focused my dual-majors of Communication and English on the writing tracks.

I still wanted to make things, to make movies or something, but again, I don’t know what it was that kept me from going all in. Fear, most likely. Fear of the unknown, fear of leaving the security blanket of friends and family to move to New York or LA, fear of failure, fear of judgement.

(It probably didn’t help that I was developing a pretty bad relationship with alcohol at this point of my life, and in retrospect, had I made those moves, I don’t know that I would be alive today. Fortunately I quit everything in 2002, so my twenties weren’t a total waste.)

And after college, I fell into the malaise that many recent grads did, unsure of what to do with myself as I was now, quite officially, an adult and responsible for myself. I remember thinking (and still do now, from time to time) that there must have been a mistake: I shouldn’t be allowed to roam free without any supervision.

Fast forward: I began chasing the wrong things. I miscalibrated happiness. I was varying degrees of miserable.

(I will say that my ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder, for those of you who aren’t into the whole brevity thing) was likely exacerbating this. I was diagnosed in high school, and chose not be be medicated for it until late last year. It turns out that depression and anxiety are byproducts of ADD.)

Anywho, my job as a sales manager was eliminated in 2018 after working there for 10 months, and I once again, for the first time in 10 years, unemployed. I started to apply for sales manager and marketing manager jobs, but I wasn’t getting any bites. I can’t say why, for sure, but I hypothesize that because, even though I’d been managing sales teams and marketing programs for the last 10 years, I didn’t have industry experience and “marketing” in my job title, I wasn’t getting a second look.

I was falling deeper and deeper into a hole of despair. How come no one wanted me? Have I wasted my professional life? Do I have any actual skills? It looked more and more like I was going to have to take a huge step back in my career and take a much lower paying job with less responsibility and prestige.

At some point in 2019, I decided to try something new. I figured that if I was going to have to take this “step back” as it were, and take a sales position somewhere (as those seemed to be the positions that were open most often), I might as well sell something that I believe in: me.

To be continued…