My biggest critic

Recently I have been spending quite a substantial amount of time thinking about what I want to achieve and how I want to do it. At the tender age of 24 (is it still tender?Its not that old, right?) I am already feeling entirely conflicted between the pressure to progress in my career at the same time as fulfilling my life's ambition - a world tour.

Don't get me wrong, the pressure is entirely self inflicted. I am not a woman who stays at home cooking and you better believe it when I say I don't just want to be at the top of the tree, I want to be at the top of every tree. So while I am not yet on my world tour (watch out world I'm coming to get you in errr...December 2011!) I have set my heart, mind and life focus on creating the beginnings of a substantially successful journalistic/PR career. In Birmingham.

Now I don't want to rattle on about the economic climate and mass unemployment but at the same time, as a reasonably recent graduate who is massively ambitious, its fair to say that I'm furiously frustrated by looking up at the tree from a twig somewhere high enough that I'm on the tree, but still low enough to jump back down if necessary. To me, every unanswered email, unsuccessful application and forgotten phone call is another acorn hitting me clean between the eyes as I try to claw my way through the branches, biting my lip in an attempt to stop myself from screaming WHEN AM I GOING TO GET A BREAK!? No one said it would be easy, and yes the best things that come to you in life are the ones you've really worked for but to me those acorns are failures and "you'll never amount to anythings". I lie awake at night taunting myself into insanity, I think its fair to say I have something to prove. To myself.

This is my mother.

Yep, shes as barmy as she looks. Whilst my dad is highly successful - enough so that he is retiring next year at 50, a fact I am both proud and and enviable of as I will more than likely work 20 years past this, my mom (and I use the American spelling because that's how I say it, ok?) to me, has a different kind of success. Whereas my dad has been in the same career for the past 30 years, my mom gave up hers in order to support the family from home and in turn lavished attention, paint and mud on my brother and I. At the same time, while we were in bed she went to night school to keep her qualifications up to date and later worked nights - taking us to school at the end of her shift. Over the years as we have grown up she has had to carve herself another career, and has done a blooming marvelous job. In fact during a period of time off a couple of years ago her workplace was forced to employ two extra staff to cover her workload!

So perhaps I do know where this ambition and soul destroying perseverance comes from after all. Just maybe not the dress sense...

Aimée L’amour x

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