My Own World

I had finished University and I thought “What do I want to do with my life?”

I decided that I wanted to help people and took on a voluntary job for an environmental charity.  It was interesting to see how unorganised the voluntary sector was.  My job title where I ‘worked’ was called ‘Campaign Officer’ and even in reflection I still have no idea what the job role was.

So every Monday I would go into the charities headquarters and do my eight hours.  After a couple of months I got bored of blagging my days and doing nothing of value so I started my first blog researching and writing articles on current events that were of interest to the charity.

It didn’t really help anyone or make my life better, but it saved me from boredom.

During this time period I had gone from being unemployed to a part time job that wouldn’t pay to give me a better life.

I gradually found that working for a campaigning charity took up more and more of my spare time, mostly because I was being guilted into attending some LGBT bake-off or other random event that held no interest to my core interests.

I attended activist events in the hope by ‘socialising’ I might get the touch of another woman after a 1+ year dry spell.  I couldn’t even enjoy a weekend anymore as my part time job had made me work seven Saturdays in a row.

Soon I became burnt out – I was poor, lonely and had no future and I thought “How am I supposed to make other people’s lives better if I can’t even make my own life better?”

After returning from another day of volunteering paying a train fare that I couldn’t really afford I decided to live my life on the following philosophy:

“Before you can make the world a better a place, you have to make your own world better first”

I cut down on all the additional voluntary activities and although I got flak because I missed body positive sign making class I started looking for and soon found a full time job that wouldn’t impact my social life.

I then quit the voluntary job ‘helping people’ and started doing more hobbies and socialising with others.  This led to various ups and downs, but it was all good because my life felt like I was moving in the right direction.

I look back today and my world is a better and I will never lose focus on making it even better.  I do feel that I am in a better place to help others, but when I see incidents like the Paris attacks I really don’t know what I can do.

So I go back to focusing on my world it’s much nicer.