I’ll be 24 soon
I’ll be 24 soon. My first sentence might make it seem like my birthday is tomorrow and I am staring at the clock. It may seem like it’s 11:50 PM and I am scrambling to write down all my regrets before midnight.
But it’s none of those things. My birthday is in December and I am writing this in July. It’s midday and I am not in a hurry to finish this.
Mostly because I am unsure if I should be writing this. For a long time, I tried to create content. Articles that would help my reader and at the same time sell my services. If you look closely, my Medium page has evolved (for lack of a better word) from poetry and accounts of my life to content marketing blog posts.
A majority of these content marketing posts are crap. Some are good enough that I feel no shame and gladly pitch people with them. My article on B2B content marketing drew attention to me and helped me land a job at an agency I have always fangirled.
In turn, these articles took something from me, I no longer feel free to create. And I am very afraid of failing. So I stopped writing. The words I type out these days are for others. For businesses looking for customers. Looking to convince readers to try out their SaaS solution. I love what I do; there’s no doubt about that but there’s something missing.
I want my Medium page and my defunct blog to be like Felicia Sullivan’s. She dishes out amazing articles on brand strategy and still writes about herself as a human. It’s beautiful and so well balanced.
But I am too robotic and chaotic to do this. Or at least I think I am.
I want to be able to write what I want. I want to be able to say what I think about content and life and be wrong. And to learn that I was wrong. I want to have records of where I am at now so I can look back at it later.
As a woman in her twenties, I am going through so many changes. I moved out of my parent’s house to a new city. To a small apartment which I share with two other people. I am earning more than my parents and even more than 20x times what people my age are earning in my country. I have a great job that sometimes overwhelms me. I am constantly thinking about the future and what I need to do to get to where I am going. But the question is what do I want? I am learning about my body. I am learning to love and travel to new places. I am learning to cook what I desire and to take care of my body. I am learning hard lessons in creating boundaries and harder ones in self-awareness.
I want to be able to write about these things. Now I know what you are thinking. No one is stopping you. But it doesn’t feel that way. I feel like I have a certain image to keep up. That image is the smart young content marketer at Animalz that writes fire case studies and guest posts on big blogs and has it all figured out. But I really want to be a young woman learning how to navigate life, who likes anime and Pinterest recipe videos and is socially awkward.
Content marketing is not all I will do. It is not all of me. I am still a writer. And I want to write about other things. Stories I can come back to when I am 25 and even years after that.
I’ll probably never publish this but I am keeping this here to remind me that it is okay to write about what I want. That I can pick up my laptop, sit at my desk, and start typing without looking at the SERPs. Because there’s more to life than ranking for a keyword and not every story is meant to be optimized for search. Not everything I write needs to be applauded. Sometimes all I need is a pat on the back from myself. For showing up and for trying.
