The first thing people ask me is where I work now that I’ve graduated and I always reply meekly, “Oh just retail”. Four years of university and I’m still working in retail. Gah.

I’ve held on to a lot of shame. Shame that I failed to achieve the grades I wanted, shame that I let myself down in final year, shame that I didn’t try harder to get an internship, shame that I’m not where I thought I would be and shame that I just don’t seem to be doing anything. I’m not really sure why I’m ashamed really? Or who I should be attempting to impress? I guess I’m so used to the natural progression of things in my life that this lack of direction is throwing me way off balance. Everything in my life has followed a clear path, one school year to the next, then to university and now I’m all out of plans.

I as an individual struggle with ‘going with the flow’, for me, events have to have structure with a clear defined beginning, middle and end. Life doesn’t work that way, you can’t plan everything down to the minor detail. You can speculate, you can allow, predict or work towards but you can never know exactly what will happen. Ever.

Anyone who knows me knows that I want to go back to Seoul and to make that a reality the easiest route is to go there and teach English. From that with the money I save doing that, I can go right back into academics, where it’s safe and structured. That is by far the weakest thought process I’ve had. If this was something I wanted to badly, why wasn’t I already there? Over the past three months I’ve half heartedly worked on my application, always finding one reason or another why I could never finish my application. It wasn’t sudden but I realised that I was running away, taking the easy road out because the thought of the unknown scared me. I’ve always wanted to do my masters, but I always thought of doing it five years or so after my BA, or while working. Pure academics has never appealed to me, so now why was I running towards it? Or at least pretending to be? I was doing it because I felt inadequate. Life hadn’t worked out like I thought it would, so at least I could save face by going somewhere interesting. I’m so stupid sometimes.

Teaching English in Korea was supposed to be a fall back plan. The one thing that I kept hearing from recruiters was that I didn’t have any experience and no internships. This is true. One of my best qualities is that I always find a way to make myself useful. I’m a born Media person, everything I went to university to do, I do daily on a regular basis for my friends and family. I love organising, I love planning, I love getting people together and above all I love seeing my hard work, work. When I was asked by a recruiter what kind of work I wanted I said, experience because I couldn’t see exactly how what I learned in university could be applied in the workplace. 

I’ve been working on the Reddit Round Robin project and I’ve been reluctant to see what my work is for what it actually is. I’m applying all the knowledge I gained over four years into making this project actually successful. It’s maddening because it’s something we started on the side as a fun project and in a way I felt a little stupid for taking it so seriously. It’s just a video game right? I shouldn’t invest so much time into it, I should go out and get a real job. The problem is that while I’m looking for a way to get more experience in the industry I’m overlooking a real opportunity for me to make mistakes, test out my skills and build something with people who I’d consider friends. Doing this, knowing it might fail horribly, knowing others might not see it the same way I do scares the crap out of me. But at the same time it’s kind of exciting. I don’t know what will happen, I’m trying this ‘going with the flow thing’. If it doesn’t work, then teaching English in Korea is a back-up plan. 

Ehh, I’m 24, I got time. 

So I guess I should reintroduce myself.

Hi there, I’m Khaleesi, and I work in Marketing. 

And because you read the whole thing here’s a gif of a cute cat.