Once someone told me that I never had a career. Does it mean it’s because a big company with benefits never hired me, or I never made as much money as my spouse does? I don’t know what that person meant.
Anyhow, I had a freelance career for about 15 years before the pandemic hit. None of the big corporate organizations hired me, but I was lucky enough to find projects to keep me busy building a web/graphic design business. Even if my children were born, I kept working while caregiving for them.
I could have done better to find a stable full-time job like the one at an organization that comes with a benefit package. But I couldn’t do it because of multiple obstacles to overcome.
I’m a woman of color speaking English as a second language. I earned a college degree when I was 27 because I had to make and save money to pay college tuition. I had to build my life in the United States without immediate family. My starting point was already behind the most privileged Americans.
No one hired me after graduating college because of my broken English and the Dot-Com recession. But luckily my mentor/professor at CSU hired me and allowed me to use computer and web design skills. That’s how I started my freelance career after working as a studio assistant.
I could have done better to switch from a freelancer to an employee at an organization. But I couldn’t do it because no one hired me without a strong portfolio. So I kept freelancing to build an impressive portfolio to prove my skills and talent.
Someone pointed out that I didn’t have confidence: A lack of confidence was my weakness, which prevented me from challenging to get a stable job. Of course, I was aware of it, but I didn’t know how to gain more confidence back then.
4 years before my children were born, I lost my father and my mentor. My father died of cancer. My mentor died from being killed by a gunshot. I experienced two traumatic events in two consecutive years. How could I have gained my confidence while recovering from grief?
After the first children were born, there was no time to apply for a job. All I could do was to keep working on freelance small projects not to interfere caregiving for my children. It was very difficult to raise children without much help from immediate family. Finding a stable job was just a fleeting dream of mine.
When my youngest daughter was 3 ½ years old, the pandemic hit. I had to give up my long-awaited dream: To find a stable job! It was almost a luxury to focus on myself during the pandemic. But the pandemic made me think about what I really want to accomplish professionally and personally in my life.
So I started considering a career change: A career something meaningful to my life; something that could reflect my experience as a woman of color, mother, bilingual community leader, and web graphic designer.
I will be 50 years old next year. Yep, I’m a middle-aged woman. In other words, I’m an old woman. Someone might say it’s too late to change the course of life. But I wanted to do so because I didn’t want to regret it later in my life. Most importantly, I wanted to be happy with myself.
Life is only what I can have. It’s mine and I’m the only one who can drive. I’m the only one who can change the future.
At the end of October, Cleveland Public Library officially hired me. It’s a part-time position without any benefit, but the first step to the final goal. It’s the beginning of my new chapter: a new career!
It’s an election day today. It depends on people to determine where the nation goes to. No matter what happens in this country, as a naturalized citizen, I want to be who I am and I want to be proud of myself for doing the right thing.
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