Write about a time in your life when things weren’t the way you or others thought they should be.
Doesn’t everyone get this feeling all the time?
Two things stand out the most because they happened over a period of time. I won’t write about them extensively.
The first is when I wasn’t treated well by two of my best friends.
The second is office politics stuff.
Growing up, what career goals or dreams of accomplishments did you have? Did any of them come to be, how many did you abandon or revise along the way?
Growing up, I think we all have pretty crazy dreams.
As a little girl I wanted to be a marine biologist or a zookeeper. Or just simply work with animals. Pretty much what lots of little girls want to do.
They just sort of phased out though. The only reason I ever said I wanted to be a marine biologist was because my dad is very passionate about the ocean and its inhabitants. I never really though it through though. It could never happen. I’m terrified of large bodies of water and I can’t swim.
The zookeeper thing lasted a little longer, and I was actually planning my high school subjects around getting into that career path. That, too, just sort of fizzled out.
In year 11, I took up accounting. I found I was really good at it, and continued it through year twelve, where I pretty much became the best in the class. Barely though, my friend was right on my ass.
Because I was finally good at something, I suppose I let people tell me that accounting would be an ideal career path for me. In year 12, my school pretty much screwed any possibility for uni up for me, which left me with the choice to either go to TAFE or take some time off studying to reexamine things.
I opted for the time off, knowing deep inside that I didn’t really want to do accounting. In May the year after I graduated high school, I got a government traineeship in business, still with accounting thing in the front of my mind.
I thrived there. I got my qualification in business, learned life and work skills, and was offered a job earning more than my mother. In finance.
During that time, I realised how much I hated working full time. It wasn’t so much the job itself that I hated, but a lot of other factors.
I realised I wanted to write. Not as a hobby, as a career.
I took up a 6 week workshop in creative writing, and changed jobs to a part-time position that I hated to begin a correspondence course in journalism. The course didn’t work out for various reasons and I dropped out.
In March of this year, I quit my job entirely, wanting to do the follow on workshop from the previous year. I was meant to start today, but the course was cut due to insufficient numbers.
I’m soon going to get my application together to study a diploma of business from the end of July. This will get me the qualification needed to get into uni to study creative writing and publishing. So that’s it. My current career goal is to be an author.
Name one thing in your life you hope you never have to see or encounter?
The death of my family members, particularly my mum, dad, older brother, younger brother, my dog, my dad’s sister and my dad’s parents, and my two closest friends.
I know it’s going to happen sooner or later, but I’ve never really lost anyone close to me. I just think it would be very hard for me to adjust to any of these people being out of my life permanently.
Over a year ago, I watched my cat die. He was just a baby and I wasn’t able to help him. He was terrified. He didn’t understand what was happening to him. He was asking for help, but there was nothing we could do. It torments me. I do even want to think about something like this happening to someone I love.
What is the most valuable item or largest sum of money you have ever found?
A couple of years ago, a friend and I were walking past the TAFE campus down the road from our houses and she found a $50 note. We split it and spent it on lollies at the deli.
But since it was my friend who found it and not me, the largest sum of money I found was on a day that I opened an umbrella inside. Mum told me it was bad luck, but later that day at her softball game, I found a $20 sitting in a gutter. Me and my friends spent that on lollies too, from the canteen this time.
I don’t recall ever having found something valuable. I guess people don’t lose such things around where I live.
I don’t think this really counts, but when I was little, my family and I were driving up north to Kalbarri and two bikes fell off of the bike rack of the car in front of us, so we pulled over and took them h_h
Name one thing that has always fascinated you.
The first thing I can think of off of the top of my head is space.
When I was a kid, space used to freak me out, yet at the same time I found it absolutely fascinating, and I still do.
The thought of the universe being so vast, and possibly endless, is something I’ve never quite been able to comprehend. I get this really weird feeling when I think about it, kind of like the feeling when you’re thinking of a particular word, but can’t quite catch it. It sits there, at the front of your mind, just barely out of reach.
It’s also hard for me to imagine other planets. I mean, I know they’re there, but it’s a little scary to think about just how different from our planet they can be. For example, what kinds of minerals and elements are can be found on other planets. Do they have some of the same as our planets? What kind of organisms can they harbour, because I believe that even if there hasn’t been much sign of life on the planets in our solar system, it’s naive to think that there isn’t any other living thing out there.
Is there an end to the universe? They say it’s never ending, but how can they know? If there is, what’s outside of it. Where are we, really? We are on a giant rock floating around a ball of gas alongside other, even bigger, rocks and balls of gas, but where? It’s just something that I can’t fathom.
Black holes are another thing that really scares me. I don’t know too much about them for this reason. They scare me. Pictures of them scare me. I can’t even read about them.
