I Want To and I Can

I’m sharing things on Facebook again! Shameless self-promo got me here and I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop now. Plus people keep telling me they enjoy this, so if you don’t, please go find those people and tell them to stop encouraging me (more on this later).

In news that surprises absolutely nobody, peacock-baby was an unequivocal social media success:

There’s a pun about ‘peaking’ here somewhere but I’m too lazy to find it.

I’ve met a lot of people since I got here - this is not bragging as much as it is a reflection of how many people have come and gone since I arrived - I seemed to arrive at the perfect time to say goodbye to 99% of my friends from that moment forward. If I were a business I’d be under investigation for staff turnover by now.

I do currently have friends though which is very exciting for me and very satisfying for my extroverted side (there is no other side) which could be driven slowly mad if I didn’t spend my time driving the people around me slowly mad instead.

The thing about meeting a lot of people and also having quite a varied and ‘non-linear’ career trajectory so far, is that I get asked a lot of questions about how I ended up in various places and jobs. I can’t even describe what I do now properly, but once someone described it for me and they did it so well that the reaction I got was not blank stares but appreciative nods and ‘that’s so cool’. The way they said it made me really believe it, I wish I’d heard what he said.

So I wanna talk about it, because you can, actually, do whatever you want. You don’t have to be beholden to your degree subject or your first job for the rest of your life. You can change career, or start a new career, or just do more than one career.

Basically: if you want to you can. It frustrates me endlessly, in the most affectionate way, to hear people say they’d love to do things with that resignation which suggests that doing what you want is meant for other people. It isn’t. The things you want are there for you to have. And maybe you won’t want them, maybe they aren’t what you thought they’d be.

This is not advice, I am the authority on no one’s career, but I am pretty good at giving everything I want to do a bloody good go.

Send the email.

This week I sent all of the emails to everyone I should have emailed in the past few months. The weird thing about not telling people who don’t know you exist that you have an idea or want to be involved in something is that they never find out. Send the email. Send it now. Don’t forget those attachments. Now send it.

There is no good justification for anything on my CV apart from ‘I wanted to, so I asked if I could’. I just said ‘I can do that’ and that is I ended up with about 90% of what I have now. No one has offered me anything without a little of me waving my arms and yelling ‘I am here, and I am capable’.

I know how completely absurd it is to say ‘I just did it because it sounded cool and I wanted to’, but why the hell shouldn’t I? Who says I have to go from my degree into a normal job. Certainly not my parents - thank you endlessly for raising me to think I could be exactly what I wanted even if I didn’t know what that was. It’s also comforting to know we share the same pain of trying to explain to the people around us what it is that I’m actually doing. One day maybe I’ll get a normal job, and small talk will finally be just that, rather than an epic description of my incredibly complex career to date.

I also know it’s not that simple. I have sent a thousand emails and I’ve been ignored more times than I’ve had a response. I’ve applied for about ten times more jobs than I’ve had. I’ve pitched so many things that are still no closer to seeing the light of day than they were a year ago. Just saying ‘I want to and I can’ will not always be enough. Never saying ‘I want to and I can’ will absolutely never be enough.

It’s such a pointless curse to put on yourself to spend more time worry about how qualified you are rather than actually going out and getting it. No one is going to put you on a blacklist because you weren’t quite right for the job, no one is going to mass-forward that pitch you sent just because it wasn’t right for their publication. You will not be for everyone and some things just aren’t for you.

Mostly I’m just surprised it’s taken this long.

Accept praise, no one is doing it for the good of their health. Tell people to fuck off, for the good of yours.

The other answer to ‘how did you end up doing that’ is ‘someone told me I could’. The blog was someone else’s idea, actually, as was working in fashion. The writing career was suggested to me on the back of a ‘feedback postcard’ my Drama teacher sent home when I was 16. Nearly everything I ever thought I could do was someone else’s idea. Basically everyone just suggests things to you and you just have to be ready to hear them.

One exception goes to the career choice quizzes we had to do at school, every time I got my results the careers adviser only ever warned me that the chosen industry was too competitive. Listen girl I didn’t make the quiz, and I’m pretty sure it only has 30 possible outcomes, so please stop telling me I can’t fulfil my automatically generated dream of being a landscape gardener.

Let people tell you what they think you can do. Don’t let them tell you who you are. I let everyone tell me I was too quiet, not creative enough, not the right sort of person to do so many things, for such a long time. What a complete waste of time. People who warn you off your own personal development are not good authorities on who you are. Ignore them and get back to sending all those emails.

One person’s Renaissance Woman is another’s Total Mess, as the saying goes.

Stop living your life like you’re going to school reunion tomorrow when there’s so much you can’t control. You will work really hard at things only to have them thrown back in your face, you will get offered stuff because someone liked your stupid personal Twitter feed.

2015 was an absolute car-crash, I’m not too proud to say so, and it would have been understandable if I’d decided to give myself a bit of a break and stop trying to do the things I really wanted to when they’d pretty much all failed. There is not a week that has gone by that  I haven’t said a little thank you to myself for not doing that. For giving everything a really good go, and then another one just to make sure.

xx

I’m on Twitter - @clairegillesp - it’s really just pictures of Jeff Goldblum this week guys. I also called all men pigs with impressively good-humoured results.

I’m on Instagram - clairegillesp - where there is an actual picture of my actual new hair because I’ve finally made peace with it. We also have a new cat and he’s my fave thing so photos to follow soon.

I’m listening to ‘Shout Out To My Ex’ by Little Mix because there was a complete female Twitter love-in when they performed this on the X-Factor last night, and as we all know, nothing makes me happy like women supporting other women. If you don’t believe women can love one another then go look at the hashtag from this and enjoy being wrong.