Personal Development
I found my purpose, what do I do now?
Seriously. I need advice.
I will not be giving you advice in this article. I will simply be sharing my story, hoping you will find something useful in there.
You see, for the longest time, I have searched and searched for something meaningful to do with my life. Out of high school, I kind of made choices without thinking about them. And that’s what you do when you’re 17 and have no clue of what the real world is really like.
I thought I wanted to be in marketing but it did not take long for me to recognize that it wasn’t for me, yet, I finished a whole bachelor's degree in digital marketing anyway. Then, I took a gap year because I was as lost as when I was out of high school.
I went back to my home country, worked for a while and at this point, my purpose was screaming at me. I knew it was coming. I felt it growing in my heart while I was a student. This fire inside me was telling me to stay in my home country, to blaze my own path and be part of the change my country needed, and it scared me to death because I had 0 clues of how to even start on this journey.
So, at this point, I knew what my purpose was, I hadn’t chosen it by any means, so I felt completely blindsided.
Aren’t you supposed to choose your own purpose and destiny? And how is it even possible to feel called to something you have absolutely no skills in? Also, how do you know that this purpose is really for you? Because clearly, there are millions of other people who have a million times more skills for the task at hand than I do.
I knew that to accomplish this newfound purpose I would have to make big changes to my life and work my ass off for years to even dream of seeing it come to fruition. So, I did what only a few people would do. I chickened out and left the country. Yes, I did!
The thing I wanted for so long which was to find meaning in life showed itself to me and I just ignored it and left.
I went back to Paris to go to grad school instead. I buried myself in school projects, got completely distracted by other people’s goals and ambitions, and started imagining a life opposite to what it would be had I followed my purpose: Staying in Paris, getting a job, working my way up the corporate ladder, starting a few side hustles here and there, buying a house, and living happily ever after. And there is nothing wrong with that, but I still felt like it was not for me.
I wish I could tell you that I took charge of my life again and that I started taking steps towards my goal, but that simply wouldn’t be true. I wish I could tell you that I had an “Aha!” moment where I realized I should quit everything to pursue my purpose.
But then COVID happened, and my home country closed its borders completely. So the choice was kind of forced on me, I had to stay in Paris and do something with my life. I had to let go of the thought that after COVID I’ll go back home, and I was right. Because those borders stayed closed for 1.5 years.
At the time of writing this, I am still in Paris, starting a new job at a big group, but every night before I go to bed, I think about this so-called purpose with all the overwhelm that comes with it and then I just bury it inside of me to take on the next day.
There isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t ask myself what would happen if I were to go after that purpose, maybe I would actually enjoy it and never want to go back, or on the contrary, I would find within a week that it wasn’t for me after all.
So I guess this article is more me asking for advice than giving it, sorry about that. Have you ever felt like you were called to do something? If yes what happened?
