No Education and Big Ambitions

I am very lucky, my day job doesn't require that I get up very early or even that I get to my place of work before 9:30am. It's not particularly intellectually challenging, you need to be organised and flexible and have an eye for detail. Other than that though its not particularly demanding of you brain power, and thinking about it anyone with an average I.Q could do it, or even a trained chimp. So of late I've grown bored and dissatisfied with my less than exciting, if easy and with quite a few advantages job. So I've started to look around for something else, a challenge, and this is where my real problems set in. You see, although I'm quite an intelligent, even eloquent person I have little to no formal education. I left school without any significant grades and went on to live in the real world instead of going on to learn something else, something that might have been useful. I don't regret my decision to see the world instead of getting an education, what I learned from my travels could never have been learned from dry, passionless text books. In fact, my travels are the material from where I wrote my novel, which slowly grows closer to being published (slow being the defining word), so had I never experienced the joys of world travel I wouldn't have written my novel or even met my husband. Now though, as I wait patiently for the publishers to get going, I realise that without the dull boring pieces of paper to show there is a very very small chance of my ever getting any other job than some kind of caretaker. Cleaning, cantine work or daycare. When what I really want is to be paid for writing, a published author, a successful blogger or possibly even a journalist or columnist. But well the chances that this blog suddenly goes into high readership in the next month are pretty slim. My only real chance at fulfilling my ambition is the novel, newspapers tend only to hire people with bits of paper to prove they know what they're doing to write stories for them. Columnists tend to have great blog readership before they land columns in national newspapers and as we've discussed, there's a slim chance of that. So it looks like I have to resign myself to working in some kind of caretaker facility, or at least until my book is published and hits the best sellers list. Even my realist brain, that which I fight constantly, tells me not to count my chickens before they hatch. Hope is humans favourite way of torturing ourselves, and yet it is also humans strongest survival trait, that quality that makes us refuse to quit. That glimmer of light that brings people back from the edge of death, from plane crashes and impossible odds. See what a great talent is being wasted cleaning up after other people and making lunch for 40? See why I feel so down in the mouth about it? Me and my frustrated ambitions. Til next time my friends.