108. Why I don't have a normal job.

I've always been on the move, ever since I was a kid and I don't want to stop now.

When I was around 11 years old, my family and I lived on an urbanization next to a golf course. Our garden ended where the green was, so we used to get loads of stray balls landing on our grass after people shouting “fore!!” and I used to go around picking them up and storing them in buckets. Then, I’d scrub them with dish soap and sell them back to the golfers in plastic see through bags separated by brand. I’d sell a bag of golf balls (I can’t remember how many) for 10 euros. I used to get so excited when they’d hand over a crisp ten euro note but I used to hate it when I needed to give them change, I was never any good at maths. This was my first ever summer venture and I think I spent all of my money at the Sunday market buying Pokémon cards.

Another memory I have is one of me running down the hill at night to go home for dinner in this same urbanization jumping and shouting “I got my first job!”. When I arrived, I burst through the front door to find my parents sitting chilling on the sofa watching TV while I proceeded to scream and shout because of how excited I was. My first job! I only had one friend my age while living there, her name was Harriett and her mum wanted me to teach her Spanish. I was so excited, I felt unstoppable and funny enough, these things never scared me. They always made me feel bigger and like I was really accomplishing things.

While I was in the last year of high school at the age of fifteen I tutored two kids English. This opportunity came about while I was sat at the hairdresser one day. The woman cutting my hair owned the salon and asked me if I was interested in helping her two children learn to speak better English and of course I said yes without hesitation. Another job!

I’ve always thought that you get money by finding a way to get stuff done, by giving to others, and I’ve always enjoyed the feeling of meeting new people, chatting with them and seeing how doors open leading to new places. I was always up for these random jobs and I loved doing them. My biggest crash personality wise and mentally was when I got to the age of having to study the Spanish Baccalaureate and hated it. My life was pretty turbulent during those years but the education system didn’t help. I felt like I was stupid and useless. In school, we were told from a young age that smart people study sciences which are composed of all of the general subjects plus the specific ones which are academic maths, physics and chemistry, biology, applied anatomy, technical drawing, technology and probably a few more subjects that I was terrible at. I never wanted to go to university, I just wanted a job I enjoyed but that’s not what successful, rich people do. They study hard degrees to get hard jobs to be important and earn lots of money. Be a lawyer, be a doctor, be an engineer. God knows how many times I was told as a child that I’d work in the United Nations as an interpreter because I was bilingual in English and Spanish, little did these people know that being bilingual isn’t actually as rare as they thought.

Another golf-course-urbanisation-house-memory is me being by the communal pool in summer talking to all the adults because the topics people my age spoke about would bore me to death. My dad walked over to drag me away from the poor man I was probably annoying and as we left he said “she’ll be president one day that girl” to which my dad smiled and replied “she’s twelve going on twenty two”.

I’ve always wanted to sit at the “adult table” at family dinners or when we’d go out for dinner with my parent’s friends. I was absorbed by all of the things I’d learn in a few hours in their company. I craved information, especially when they’d speak in code and I’d pretend that I had no idea what they were talking about. I remember one year we were having dinner with the couple my parents would always hang out with and I overheard that they’d bought their son (my brother’s friend) a Nintendo DS for Christmas and I was sworn to secrecy, I felt powerful all because I’d been hovering around the adult table, the conversations going on at the kiddy table were probably about Mario Kart.

I always found the fact that I’d never be able to run out of things to learn thrilling because there was so much out there and when I was a kid the only internet we had was Facebook and MSN which basically meant chatting to kids I went to school with. This was back when “using Google was cheating” when doing homework. The stuff I Google nowadays is crazy imagine what it would have been like when I was ten.

I learned a lot by reading encyclopaedias. My grandpa (known as G.P because he thinks he sounds cooler and less old) used to get me an encyclopaedia with each issue of the newspaper, then my mum started getting them for me so I could have the whole collection and I kept them on the bookshelf in my room in alphabetical order. They were my pride and joy. My favourite diagrams were the ones where they showed the size of dinosaurs next to humans, that used to blow my mind.

Over the years, I’ve done many more random paid jobs which I thought were super impressive and important for my resumé but it turns out that most of the world thinks like my teachers used to: if you don’t get an important degree and work at an important company, you didn’t try hard enough. To be honest, I don’t think my parents ever made me think this way or pressured me into becoming anything, it came from the Spanish education system because they’re all obsessed with university degrees. Probably because they’re pretty much free and accessible enough to most people so you’d be stupid not to get one.

I dropped out of the Spanish Baccalaureate first time around after failing 8/10 subjects in the first trimester. I told my dad that I was never going back and wanted to be treated like an adult (I was sixteen I think, lol). Good on him because he went into silent mode and the following morning, when I hadn’t gone to school, he told me not to worry, that I was never going back again and that I was going to learn what it meant to make “adult decisions” and that was that, no more wanting to die on a school bus every morning at 7:30 a.m. Some time later, he set me up a business called “Teach Me English” and “Teach Me Spanish” but it never fully took off back then.

Yes, the hair was terrible.

After a few months of sabbatical I decided I wanted to study nursing and so I went to a private college and I did that for a year. It was the first time I ever enjoyed going to classes with a teacher and sitting at home revising. I thought it was fascinating and I loved every second of it. That’s what led me to going back to the Spanish Baccalaureate: I wanted to be a registered nurse and nurses go to university but for me to get into university I had to pass my Spanish A-Level exams so back into hell we went.

I accomplished it in the end, God knows how but I did the science baccalaureate and one of my fondest memories is calling my dad who was living in Dubai with my report card in my hand telling him I’d passed. He cried and couldn’t believe it. He never cries but that day he did and I felt like I’d made him proud for once.

Long story short: to this day I don’t have a normal job. I didn’t finish my degree in English linguistics and history, I did three years out of the four, I got 80-90% on most of my modules and I decided that that was good enough. I wasn’t learning anything I was passionate about and all the system was focussed on was vomiting theory on a final exam and acting like a parrot reciting notes. That wasn’t making me grow in any way, it was doing the opposite. I do remember one person with admiration and utter respect though, his name was Miguel and he taught me Arabic. He was an amazing professor and I learned so much. I was actually sad to leave because I wanted him to be my final thesis tutor but I couldn’t do it. I had to go. My mental health, again while studying, spiralled and it was a period of very deep sadness and loss of self, like when I was sixteen. I decided to take a break and three years later I’m still on a break.

I’ve gone through periods in which I’ve wanted to look for a job in someone else’s company, have a boss and colleagues, go to the workplace every day, get the same salary every month on the same exact day, but I don’t think I have it in me. I’d have to sacrifice so much of my true self and I don’t think I’m ready. I made my own website and started looking for jobs as a copywriter (and anything related to writing) on LinkedIn a few months ago and I hated it. Logging into that app made me feel like the biggest loser on the planet because I haven’t followed the same path most people do. I don’t have a finalised university degree with a masters degree or two to go with it, a C1 in three foreign languages, work experience and internships… so can’t get through the filters to even get to the second round.

I’ve recently had a bit of an awakening and my mind has shifted. If my nature is to create and to hustle, to make my ideas become a reality then why can’t that be my job?

I used to think that this newsletter was the only project I was allowed to pursue because you get one project per person, but now I don’t think that has to be true. I have so many ideas and so many things I’d love to do, so why not divide my different passions into different projects? Why would I only be allowed one? This new thought pattern has felt freeing and expansive. I all of a sudden started seeing new possibilities instead of brick walls everywhere I turned. This is why I’ve decided to team up with my boyfriend and life partner, Jesús . We’ve created a new project called “Dimanche”. I’ll share the link to our website here: dimancheobjects.com and I’ll also leave our first Instagram post below so that you can head over and take a look. If you’d like to follow us to show your support, we’d appreciate it too ❤️

dimancheobjects

A post shared by @dimancheobjects

I have a few more tricks up my sleeve regarding projects but I believe in divine timing and that they’ll be ready to talk about when their moment arrives. If you’re like me and have a fire in your belly that’s pushing you towards trying new things, just go for it and don’t plan everything too much. The hardest part is starting, the rest falls into place as you go. You learn more by doing than planning so dive into the pool and just keep swimming.