Posts from ‘expectations’
The Next Three Years
People have been giving me blank stares and confused looks the past few weeks as I have announced that I have a super dooper plan for the next three years which involves a whole lot of study, both here and overseas, and no teaching.
“What?!? No teaching? But…but…you have a teaching degree! You are a teacher! The world needs teachers!”
You know what? I’m sick of doing what the ‘world’ wants so I am now off to do what I want.
“But that is awfully selfish!”
Actually no it’s not! I think it is incredibly intelligent and will make me happy. You see last year when I was teaching I felt unappreciated, used and ridiculed for the fact that I was a teacher. I was stressed out beyond belief and was having a hard time getting out of bed in the morning and functioning at an acceptable level. I was incredibly depressed and had continuous bouts of unidentifiable sickness ranging from ulcers to skin rashes. It was quite a horrible year for me.
Ben suggested that I take some time off this year.
I decided to reassess my priorities, look at what had made me happy in the past and try to focus on what I wanted my future to look like. The result was a HUGE turn around for me.
This year I have been studying music, working three casual jobs as a theatre usher and as a promo girl. I have spent every day singing, reading, learning French and watching Opera. I have cooked new and exotic meals with ingredients I didn’t even know existed before. I have gone for morning walks. I have seen snow for the first time and travelled to countries that I couldn’t have pin pointed on a map twelve months ago. Best of all, I have been incredibly happy. I have only been sick once this entire year and only for three days. I have seen and felt a difference in my manner and my outlook on life. I LOVE EVERY DAY I AM ALIVE!!!
All the changes I made this year have made me incredibly happy. Originally the plan was for this to be like a second ‘gap year’ and I would return to teaching in 2012. Looking back though, that seems like the worst decision I could make. Why go back to the unhappiness when I can continue in this new life I have created for myself?
Which brings me to now. Two weeks ago I drew up a plan for all the things I want to do and see in the next three years. It is a very long list, which I will post when I get more than a half hour break between classes and have time to type it up! In order to actually achieve these things I have to make some further changes.
The first thing to do is to sell my house.
This is a hard thing for me to do because I love my house and I love the sense of freedom, responsibility and stability it gives me. My mum said I would need it one day, well I think that day has come. If I sell my house I will be able to pay for my university fees for the next three years leaving me debt free upon graduation. That alone is a wonderful thought. It will also help me to put my first few plans into motion.
Second thing is to work less and study more.
This is hard as I am a workaholic. I don’t like to sit idle and I feel if I am not earning money then I am a constant burden to those around me and I hate that feeling. But if I want to focus on my studies than I need to commit more time to practise and research and that means creating more time for study and less for work.
Third thing is to cut back on my expenses.
I think I have been pretty good about this anyway. I usually buy the groceries with vouchers I get from online surveys. I menu plan so there is no waste at the end of the week. I buy all my clothes second hand (except underwear). I limit the use of my car and travel using public transport. I have even taken to making birthday presents instead of buying things.
With these changes I hope that the coming years will be as wonderful and rewarding as this one has been. I have had some tricky days and hard times, but the good days have been far in abundance.
In the meantime, while waiting for my house to sell, if you see me carrying a box of Freddo’s or inviting you to a fundraising event. It isn’t because I am being selfish but because I am finally following my dream and I want you to help me get there and be a part of it.
I am going to be a great singer. The journey starts here.
With your constant fixation that there must be an enormous Big Bad just around the corner because we have been happy, healthy and harmonious for several months IN A ROW now.
Really. The world doesn’t work like that.
Except when you make it that way.
Love,
Your husband.
X
When I was in primary school we regularly were asked to sell chocolates to help raise money for various redevelopments around the school. In order to make selling of the chocolates more of an incentive there would usually be prizes offered for every two boxes that were sold. The prizes would start at something small like a keyring and make their way up to things like roller blades, skateboards and bikes. My family would generally only sell the one box which was expected of us so we rarely got any of the incentive prizes. That was fine with me because I didn’t really care about that stuff anyway and when I saw how much chocolate you actually had to sell and the effort required, it just seemed a little too much. I was happy with that until I hit year three.
In year three instead of keyrings the prize for selling two boxes of chocolates was a little M & M doll, which had a back that opened up so you could store your M & M’s inside. It seemed like a really stupid and pointless item and something I didn’t really care about, that is until every girl in my class got one except for me. The other girls then started a club, in which the only thing you needed to join was one of those dolls. They even had a theme song which I remember to this day:
“Yummy! Yummy! Yummy!
I’ve got love in my tummy
And I feel like eating you!”
Every lunchtime the girls would go into the library and discuss, actually I don’t know what they would discuss, but I knew I was missing out. This went on for a few weeks. I would spend time with girls in the year below or go play footy with the boys (I still blame this time in my life for the reason I have trouble making friends with girls and my relaxed attitude to hanging out with boys). Eventually my mum noticed something was wrong and I explained to her about the M & M dolls. Now Mum was a huge helper around the school. She would volunteer in the tuckshop, she would go on school camps, she drove the bus on excursions and even helped set up and run half the school fete. One other thing she did that year, was to help distribute prizes to the kids that had sold enough chocolates to earn an incentive prize, including distributing the M & M dolls.
Mum didn’t know how desperately I wanted one but luck would have it that she had held on to a few of the spare ones and she promptly gave me one next time she went to the school. It was a brown peanut M & M shape. He had a cute smile and was giving me the a big happy wave. I can’t explain how ecstatic I was. This was my key into the “Yummy! Yummy!” club.
Next day at school I took my brown peanut M & M doll with me and showed it to my friends. I had seen all of theirs. Tanya had a yellow one, Rosie had a red one, Mia’s was green and Melissa had a bright orange one. What I had never noticed before though was that none of theirs was peanut shaped. I was different! “Ah! But that shouldn’t matter! An M & M doll is an M & M doll!”. I was so naive. The other girls looked at the strange shaped M & M doll and immediately said I couldn’t be a part of the club. Their club rules clearly stipulated that it had to be a round M & M doll and it couldn’t be an ugly colour. I was out on both counts.
I held onto my brown M & M doll and took him diligently to school with me every day. I had grown fond of him. We were both a little weird and had no one to play with.
I never was made a member of the “Yummy! Yummy!” club and I still don’t know what it is that they did every lunchtime but within another month they slowly started coming out of the library and they stopped bringing their M & M dolls to school with them. They started playing with me again and nothing more was said about the dolls. The next year we got keyrings again and the “Yummy! Yummy!” club was soon forgotten.
…the point of the story…
I still have that M & M doll, I had a hard time giving him up. I also don’t like the feeling of being left out of something that from the outside seems so important.
At the moment I have been feeling left out a lot. Many of my friends, relatives, even my teachers at school are having kids. I desperately want to join them but I know that just yet I can’t. I have other things I want to do in my life before I take that huge step. I have made that decision but it is still hard to come to terms with somedays. It is like there is a club again of which I am forbidden entry because I don’t yet have the required item, in this case a baby. I also feel like by the time Ben and I do have a baby the rules will change and I will still be forbidden entry. It will no longer be a baby club but be a toddler club or a teenagers club (at the rate we are going).
I guess I feel like that little girl again, in the playground by herself watching everyone else go off and have fun together in a club of their own.
I guess I will have to remember that there are other games I can play while I am waiting for admittance.
Images: My brown M & M doll compared to the colourful M & M dolls my friends had.
I found out yesterday that Universal Studios Singapore is holding their audition tour again in a month. I auditioned last year, quite successfully I thought seeing as I was onboarded but then missed out on a job. It was a really hard thing for me to do and i got a lot furthur than I ever expected I would. I was lacking in confidence when I went and did it more due to my circumstances last year than any undying passion to work at a theme park. This year though I’m not sure it is worth me going through it again.
Last year I was in a place where I didn’t want to be. I was in a large amount of financial debt, I was working at a school I didn’t particularly like, dealing with people and situations which were putting too much stress on my already stressed out mind, I was constantly getting sick and I was dealing with my own personal demons of thinking my life was heading nowhere. In twelve months a lot has turned around.
This year I am in a place I mostly want to be. I have cleared up most of my debts including my huge personal loan, I work for three different companies performing jobs that I have a lot of fun in, I have new friends at WAAPA who I enjoy spending time with and learning new things with, I haven’t been sick in a long time and I finally feel like I am headed in the right direction with my performing. I am learning a lot about who I am and I get to spend my days doing things like singing and learning French, which makes me incredibly happy.
Even though Universal is still there and will continue to be there I’m not going to audition this year. It would be an amazing job and a great opportunity but I am in a different place now. I have chosen a path which is going to lead me in a different direction to the one I thought I was headed for last year.
I am still disappointed that the job didn’t work out last year and I didn’t get to spend a year working and singing in Singapore, but I am happy that it took that moment to get me to reexamine my life and make decisions like going to WAAPA and quitting my teaching job, decisions which were very difficult but have proven to be good for me. I am much happier than I was and with a little hard work maybe one day I will get a contract as good as the one I missed out on last year.
Image taken by Ben of a very happy Emma, a huge change from the dark and stormy 2010 version.
So here we are; the day before the 1 year mark.
Wow, there were times there that I thought we weren’t going to make it. Times when I couldn’t figure out how to help Emma, times when I couldn’t figure out how to help myself. Times when I thought that of all the things that I COULD do, none of them were going to get us out of the hole (I thought) we were in.
But then, there have been many many days like this one; where we talked about what we wanted and dared to share a little bit of the scary dreams we hadn’t really discussed with ourselves, let along each other. Easy days of rest and getting used to each other; allowing ourselves to be ourselves and, sort of, finding out what we are really like.
It’s going to be interesting to discover where we go from here. We have some “general outlines of the frame work of what we hope to accomplish” (plans) which sound crazy and a little bit wonky. Just like us.
Yeah; I think things are going to be just great!
