The number one question put to us all our growing lives was “What do you wanna be when you grow up?”. At the age of three or four we answered with a princess, a magician, the blue power ranger or as my own three year old self, a kitty. Five years on, our answers became a little more plausible with the likes of builders, singers, teachers and doctors.

Jump 10 years down the line to 18 years of age, and yet again, the answers change. Marketing strategists, Sound engineers, Computer Scientists, Surgeons, Business Consultants… The list goes on and on. But the fact of the matter is, that our minds changed and changed and changed until we hit that last stage in our lives. When people told us that being a dancer or a DJ was not a stable form of income, that it wasn’t a path to pursue with high hopes. That it wouldn’t work. And with that, the hustle and bustle of everyday life dashed our hopes and dreams. You suddenly have an idea of how your life will turn out, sitting in an office, at a desk with a framed photo of your wife/husband and kids propped beside your computer, doing the same work day in, day out.

Now, what do you think happens when halfway through your average college life and BOOM, things are turned upside down and your idea of having a supposedly “stable” job has crashed and burned just like those dreams you had of becoming a famous DJ or Dancer, and your stuck asking “Would you like fries with that?” 50 million times a day to people who really don’t care.

What you do in life has a big big part to play in defining you as a person, as well as your happiness and a hell of a lot of other things. So can you imagine watching your hopes and dreams slowly circle and sink down the drain and then, on top of that, having your back-up plan, that you would have been moderately happy with, being ripped out from under your feet ? Let me tell you first hand, its a very despairing thing to have your dreams taken away from you like that in the first place, but twice in such a small space of time is devastating. Your lost and alone and don’t have a clue where to go next. That desire, passion and motivation you would have once had is now lost and there’s this deep dark hole sucking it all up inside you before it even has a chance to surface.

A very bright young man once told me that living is all about the now. Why think about the past when you cannot change it and why worry about a future that may not come to pass. Simple, yet extremely effective. From his advice, what I’ve taken from this is to not be afraid of who your going to be or what your going to do in life, it’ll all fall into place eventually. But sitting on your ass doing nothing about it will leave you just as stuck as you were before. Find a new dream, a new idea of who you want to be. If your not happy with your life, nobody else is going to change it for you, only you can, and only by attempting and failing can you achieve that.

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