The lack of posts for over 5 months is not because I have fallen into a black hole - even though there does seem to be an ever increasing one at the moment in the UK with the shambles that is BREXIT. No, it’s because I am in Mexico. Tehuacan in the State of Puebla to be specific.
Last Spring with a redundancy looming at a job I felt like I had given everything to and my 29th Birthday a few months away me and my partner decided to make a change. We enrolled on a TEFL course. It all felt a bit quick and irrational at the time, but now 3 months into our teaching placement, the decision is starting to feel like a real changing point.
Always talking about travel and never actually saving or planning for it, I was beginning to feel like a bit of a fraud; I was so wedded to the idea of working in the Arts and moving up through a hierarchy that I had seen so many of my colleagues do. I’m not naïve enough to think that’s the only way to do it, but I was certainly made to feel like it was the ‘proper’ way. As if the only way to achieve a job you love and are respected in involves a great big slog and years of making exhibition labels and being interrupted over in meetings. Despite the fact that those that are in those positions, constantly talk about how busy they are, how tired they are and how they don’t make their own work anymore.
You can see I do still hold onto a bit of resentment but I am trying to let it go - Frozen style - and think about the future and what I might want to do. I turn 30 in two months - I have never felt my age - whatever that means and I don’t think 30 is the end or the beginning of anything really. Never the less it does feel like a milestone, like I should be old enough now to understand what I enjoy and am good at and try and implement that into some type of career.
I listened to a podcast recently that was very helpful - someone mentioned this fixation particularly in the UK Arts sector where being a Master of something, an industry, a skill, a sector, is what you have to be. But that’s not how we work as humans. I have always felt like I spent my time trying to ‘try everything’ - mastering nothing on route. But perhaps I need to change my thinking not my methods. So starting….NOW, I am going to continue to try as much as I can. I figure on the way that I will find something exciting that I might want to spend more time on, something that I not only enjoy but I am really good at too.
