I have seriously, I mean with deep emotion, been trying to figure out what I'm going to do with my grown-up life. I feel like a frickin' Lifetime movie! It's ridiculous. I feel ridiculous. Next year both of my girls will be in high school and the work I do with social media isn't cutting it in the "personal fulfillment" category of my brain and spirit (and bank account).
My favorite thing to do is work within PicMonkey and, most recently, Canva. If you enjoy graphics, fonts, colors and creating you can spend hours (days ;-> ) on these sites. A fun thing happened quite a few months ago, I shared a plea within my Twitterverse - "Why can't I get a job just creating on PicMonkey all day?!" A few weeks later there was a Virtual Assistant job posted in a Facebook group which involved, get this, a knowledge of PicMonkey. I filled out an application along with examples of my work and got the job! I was creating in PicMonkey. Fonts, colors and graphics filled my days and I was happy. The drag part? I was being timed - severely, I thought. It became very stressful.
I had never had a job like this and I was pushing myself to work faster day after day. But the thing with creating images is that colors lend themselves to the vibe of the font and finding a balance takes time. Another piece of the puzzle was adding images as well. If my scope was narrow it would have been easier but the selections are vast. So many possibilities! And that's what makes it fun. But not when you're being timed.
I was asked to take a quote and create a new image with it AND see how many I could do in time frames that became increasingly shorter - one hour to forty-five minutes, then forty-five to thirty minutes, then thirty minutes to ten minutes. Oh boy. Not a lot of room to be creative and find joy in the process that's for sure. Time frames I get. But when you're given no room to process what's happening? That's stressful. It ended, which was a bummer.
So that was my last job. I enjoyed what I did, and I hope to do it again, I just wish the quota was per day, not "how many can you create in 10 minutes?" I'll keep trying!
How are you handling your grown-up life? Have you found ways to feed your spirit, your creative side? And, possibly, your bank account?