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On Purpose.
Even now, at the tender age of 22, I feel blessed to be able to say that I don’t work ‘for money’. I work because it brings me joy. That it (currently) brings a degree of financial prosperity is a nice side-effect that I do not take for granted.
Work (and by that I mean anything that requires me to look beyond or into myself for the sake of a greater good) — or, more specifically, doing it — is what enables me to learn, grow and evolve into the best possible version of myself.
Yet the most lucrative ventures sometimes have no ostensible value at all.
It is the work that I have done on myself over the last N years that has enabled me to get to this point, both mentally and physically; yet I would be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t also point out that said work was gut-wrenchingly painful at times and came with no guarantee of success.
Like many people, I have been in dark places at points in my life. And, as is common when in the depths of despair, when I was in those dark places I also couldn’t imagine my life being any different. More to the point, I couldn’t imagine myself feeling any different; when not excruciatingly painful, life was foggy, monotonous and exhausting, and my personal experience — and by extension identity — was tightly entwined with that.