Wednesday, August 26, 2015

This I Believe


This I Believe
         I first started working second semester of my junior year in high school as a waitress. I mainly worked a couple nights a week after school and every morning on the weekends. At first, I loved my job and especially all the money I was making with tips. I began to love my job so much I requested more hours. My mom had warned me not to get ahead of myself with my new job because I still needed to focus primarily on school. I understood what she was saying but was too naïve to put any meaning behind her words. So like most important stuff my mother tells me; it went in one ear and out the other. As I continued waitressing for the rest of my high school career I began to feel differently about my job. It was stressful, hard to balance with school, I had inconvenient hours, and overall it was a negative place to work. But I continuously told myself it is worth the money. On the positive side, I attained a large amount of spending money working as often as I was. I went shopping almost every week, went out to eat way too often, and developed some not so good habits that money can buy. My job only began to get worse, management was practically inexistent and coming to work was dreadful. I started to really ponder if the money was actually worth it. I could see all around me that people my age work normal jobs with normal hours and survive just fine. That was when I realized that money doesn’t buy happiness. Working a dreadful job with long dreadful hours may give you a plentiful amount of spending money, but at the end of the day I realized that that doesn’t mean anything to me if I’m spending majority of my time in an unhappy place.
            To me happiness comes from the people I surround myself with, the memories I make and will always cherish, and the experiences made that you can truly obtain without tangible objects. As I look ahead at my future I envision my belief staying with me for all my life. It’s a great feeling to know that some of the best days of my life have yet to occur and I still have so much to be grateful for. I’m glad I came to the realization that money can buy many things in this crazy world but happiness isn’t one of them.


https://soundcloud.com/em8675309/this-i-believe

1 comment:

  1. Hi Em. It's good that you realized the importance of doing something for a living that you are passionate about early on--that will serve you well. Overall, you do nice job here. You have a clear and engaging writing voice. But I do wonder if you could re-work the narrative. You basically tell it chronologically (in the order in which they occurred), but you could draw the audience's attention more with different formats. Maybe start with an image or moment when all the horrible parts of the job crystalized for you to get people interested, then backtrack to fill in the rest of the story. Anyway, let me know if you have questions.

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