Life hasn't actually gone to plan over the past few years. I was going to be a hot shot solicitor, but that meant working fourteen hours a day and missing bed time stories; so I jacked that career in. I was supposed to have three kids, but nature decided that I wasn't, so I have my one and only, who is totally and utterly amazing in every way. Next, I was going to be a writer, as I can work from home and fit it in around my family, but only one article published in a year and many editors not even bothering to return emails was slightly disheartening, and the lawyer in me became slightly peeved at that! Oh and I did write a book for NaNo, but that needs editing, I just keep picking it up and putting it back down again. I mean, if no-one wants to publish my articles, they won't want my book!
Now, I am wanting to be a teacher! OK, no harm in that, but if I qualify, it would be my third, yes third profession before I reached forty! Prior to becoming a solicitor, I was a nurse in a busy A&E department. Got a bit fed up of the verbal and physical abuse, so I left and headed back to university to get a degree in Law! I didn't actually think I would ever qualify as a solicitor, but I did, eventually. Then jacked it in as it wasn't the career that I thought it would be.
We need the money, so I need a job and there is no way on this planet I want to return to the law. It is so not the career for me. I didn't enjoy it and if I were to return I am sure it would be very brief. I would probably be sacked for failing to hit target! I am so unmotivated by monetary targets, I will just fail and I have no desire to take part in the obligatory networking and marketing. My experience of working in a law firm is all "bill, bill, bill" and it has become an incredibly solitary profession. No-one has any time, work is primarily conducted by e-mail, so you rarely get to speak to another human being. Solicitors are so obsessed by targets that no-one is available to chat anymore. Nowadays, most lawyers run their lives in six minute units and have to account for and time record every single moment of the working day! No thanks!
Now where has the teaching thing come in? Well, I have recently been volunteering in my daughter's school, as a classroom helper, and considering I am not even getting paid, I totally and utterly love it and enjoy going into school three times a week to help. I really do love it. My mum is a teacher and I have consistently avoided the profession because of that very reason. Not because I didn't think I was suited, but because I was a stubborn teenager/adult who most definitely was not (I think that phrase that may have uttered from my lips was "over my dead body") going to train in the same profession as my mother!
So here I am trying to retrain yet again. How on earth young adults decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives is beyond me, I still don't know and I am thirty eight! I guess becoming a careers advisor is not for me either!
