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My Career

The Stress of Life

By Rhys PullenPublished 5 years ago 5 min read
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Have you ever noticed that your career choices change and vary as you get older? As a child, you may want to be a fireman, but as you get older you and your expectations lower about what you believe you can do.

As a child, I wanted to be an author. I would come home from school every day and write little stories and paragraphs about dragons and mythical creatures. Once I was finished with these, I would email them to my nana as she said she loves to read them in her spare time.

But as I grew older, my decisions and ambitions began to fade. I didn’t want to be an author anymore—however, the thought was still there. In the back of my mind, I knew I wanted to be something great. I wanted to be able to provide for my family, and give back to my parents for everything they’ve done for me.

As any child might want, I also wanted to get rich. But not in that silly “get rich quick” scam—no, I just wanted to make a name for myself, get my face out there for people to recognise and to look up to. As I grew older, I began getting into computers and having a passion for them. I bought my first real gaming PC, and slowly upgraded the necessary parts in order to play the games I wanted. As I played more games, my career decisions began turning towards software development and anything related with IT.

I studied ICT and computer science in secondary school—however, it wasn’t quite what I thought. At this time, I was more into the coding side of computers, like coding my own games and designing my own programmes and software.

To this day, computing and designing is still one of my main options. However, the more I played games on my computer, the more I wanted to get into creative content creating and live streaming, I spent an entire 3 years creating gaming content on YouTube, playing the games that I enjoyed for other people to enjoy watching.

I go through these random moments in my time where I’ll get the urge to spam my friend with messages about how we could create our own business and make a name for ourselves. One time, in lesson I turned to him and explained how we could make our own clothing line business. We then proceeded the spent the entire of that lesson (1hr and 10m) talking about how we were going to do this. We spoke about the expenses we would have to go through, and the profits that would have to be made for us to break even. We also planned out how we were going to brand ourselves, by the colours we were going to use and the name we would go by. We thought it would be a good idea to rent out a spot in our local area where we could place a building for our business, somewhere where it would be easily noticed and seen. But then, by the end of the day, we decided that we wouldn’t have enough of an investment for the stocks, the building and all of the rest of it, so we decided to scrap it and think of something else.

Life revolves around making money and surviving, as you may already know. This is why I, as an individual, have the urge to make a name and a brand for myself that people can know me by. I want to be able to die knowing that I made a difference in this world whether it be significant or not.

However, as you may guess, once again my mind changed. I quit YouTube as it didn’t interest my as much as it did the first few months, so I went towards the live-streaming side of creative content. If you don’t know, live streaming is when you stream a game for other people to watch live, and to interact with you whilst you’re playing. This is primarily done on the website “Twitch” as it is one of the biggest platforms. I wanted to livestream so much that I spent an entire week persuading my mum to pay for a whole new broadband package in order for our internet to be able to handle me streaming. This was because our current internet wasn’t fast enough for me to be able to stream in good quality. So once we got the new internet, I began streaming. I began gaining followers at a slow rate, however I began getting donations for streaming. Every donation I got would literally make me the happiest person alive, I would wake my mum up the next morning and explain it to her, and she wouldn’t completely understand why I was earning money for playing a game—however, she knew that it made me happy. To me, it amazed me that someone that doesn’t even know me properly, wants to pay me money, for simply playing a game. The whole concept amazed me. The reason I enjoyed streaming so much was because it allowed me to talk and interact with people from all around the world, and to meet new people and to talk with them consistently.

To this day, I still don’t have a definitive decision on what I want to do when I leave college. My best option seems to be to get an apprenticeship, as I don’t feel like I want to go university at all. Which brings me up to date, currently 18-years-old in my last year of college not having any clue on what I want to do when I’m older. Sat in this classroom right now, writing this story to get it off my chest. The stress of waking up every day still haunts me, and the thought of not having money to provide for myself and others scares me. However, I personally believe that I can push through it and actually do everything that I said I wanted to above. That’s the key to life. Wake up every day, tell yourself every day, that you can do this, you can be that. Don’t let anybody tell you any different and if they do, then tell them that you can. Nobody can stop YOU being what YOU want to be, because that’s your choice.

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About the Creator

Rhys Pullen

A small time streamer, trying to make it big on Twitch.

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