Sometimes I will think about my life as is and wonder, “What’s next?” Typically the next is what ever goes after what I currently have. So for me it was high school, college, grad school. It was boy friend, husband kids. The only outlier was my career; in that department there was no cohesion. I was a game room attendant, (the first African American female and also female), an overnight retail associate, and then a teller. With other facets of my life I had a blue print, and I followed it like the syllabus junkie that I am. It helped me create a picture for myself; however the real work started when I no longer had a pre-generated template and had to really begin to be the architect for what I wanted my life to look like. So much like the various jobs that I had had in the past, moving forward with my life and how I wanted to look was difficult for me to pin down for a while. The only thing I would come up with was what I didn’t want, what I didn’t like about what my life looked like in that moment and where I didn’t want to be. It became clear that I was focused on what I could see and not what I was able to create. That shift for me changed my trajectory. I was able to use my discontent to paint the picture of where I wanted to go who I wanted to be and what it would look like when I got there. I realized that I had to be my own syllabus for me to be successful with the things I wanted and to create the vision of striving for myself. Since that moment I have taken myself far beyond any picture that I could have imagined, and now my picture has no limits to where it can go.
