The Strange Feeling of Wanting More from Life
On loving the life you built, longing for something different, and finding a balance between ambition and contentment.
There are days when I feel I am doing everything right. I go to work, fulfil all the responsibilities given to me, make plans for future, and try to do all the things that I love, yet there seems to be something missing amidst all of this.
I work as an Assistant Professor at an Engineering Institute. My day is spent in teaching teenagers’ values alongside the subject that I love. Teaching has always been something that I admired, I looked up to my professors for the value they imparted and never thought I would be one of them someday. It’s a completely different and exciting life, going to classes, listening to students, teaching them and what not.
The best part of being a teacher is that you are forever young. With each passing year a new batch is welcomed and somewhere in between you forget the growing number.
As a child I would mimic my teacher, delivering the speech front of the mirror that I hoped to give it to my students in the future years to come.
And I did become one, but I was an accidental teacher.
The whole world knew I am meant to be a teacher, except for that little soul inside of me, because I like any other child from my generation, never realised what I wanted from my life.
No big dreams, No Wish-lists. No drama.
Just a peaceful life that would always end with the tagline “And then they lived happily ever after”
When people would say I am good at something and that I should try that profession, I would imagine myself in that role. And this perhaps continued and one fine day traversing through all the roles, I found happiness in that very profession which I belonged to.
In teaching I found my lost home.
That’s how it all started, but as every story, even this is incomplete without twists and turns, and mine started the day I joined my work.
According to most of the people including the old me, a teacher’s only work is to teach. I think even you thought the same, but if you did, I must say
“Its 21st century bro, anything can happen here”
and when I say anything, I mean literally anything and everything under the blue sky.
Our day would be 10% teaching and rest would be administrative work, clerical work, sometimes taking roles of being their parents by being their mentors and the lists goes on. And when you realise the number on your pay check remains stagnant irrespective of the exponential growth of the work assigned, you start losing yourself.
And in between all the paper work, data entry and the excel sheets that starts piling up the little child who dreamt of making classes interesting started losing her spirit and the teacher in me perhaps experienced slow death.
That’s when I started craving for professional freedom.
But I didn’t want to lose the joy of teaching, the joy of working in an institute, or having to lose our colleagues who laughed at my lame jokes even in the times of crisis.
And maybe somewhere I felt stuck.
I am happy and grateful for where I am today. Perhaps the younger me wouldn’t even imagine if I would say I have come this far, but somewhere along,
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I felt I could do better,
I felt I could reach greater heights,
I felt I could be ambitious,
but deep down I felt guilty of not being happy with the life that I once cherished and longed to have.
The dilemma to choose between wanting to fly high and stay deep rooted to the comfort zone pushed me to a mental state I never thought I would come to.
Taking a stand and choosing a life came with its own perks and disadvantages. Being ambitious looks fancy on the outside when you listen to motivational speaker’s day in and day out, but when the wallets start losing its power to buy you financial freedom, that’s when the reality hits hard.
It was always difficult for me to look far ahead of what I could become by ignoring the difficulties of the path, but somewhere in between even i started craving for some me-time which perhaps a freelancing job could give me.
Perhaps being ambitious and having a goal to be your own boss could get me what I wanted the most,
“Little time for myself”
to do something that I always wanted to do . Things like gardening, crochet, embroidery, reading books or learn something different. Something like Tarot reading or pottery. These intangible things always brought joy into my life.
But working in a 9–5 job like teaching that needs your complete attention, drained me physically and mentally altogether. And I never had the joy to build something else.
It might sound childish, but sometimes the work that brings you financial freedom consumes you so much that you are left with no energy and vitality to enjoy the fruits of it.
So, then what should I do?
Leave the job and cherish my dreams
or
stay rooted and be satisfied?
I never had the guts to find an answer, because I craved for both. And then I ended up being in a quest between the materialistic me who worked hard to get the luxuries satisfying the brain and the creative me who worked hard to satisfy the needs of my soul.
Somewhere amidst this race, I began losing myself. No matter how much progress I made, I never quite felt enough. Some days, I felt I was doing well, only to find myself feeling behind again the very next day.
It takes courage to choose one, and perhaps I am in the quest to find the middle ground.
Maybe the answer isn’t to choose between the life that satisfies my mind and the one that nourishes my soul. Maybe it is to find a way to let them coexist.
And perhaps, somewhere along the way, I will find a life that both my mind and my soul agree upon.
And then I would proudly say,
“They lived happily ever after”
