Time for a change?

I'm having a quarter life crisis. It's not like a mid-life crisis- I'm not freaking out about my hair going gray or having lost my youthful good looks (which I don't have to begin with so I anticipate that one to be very easy one day) but I have hit a different crisis nonetheless: I'm starting to wonder if I made a wrong move back in college.

I enjoyed my journalism classes, I love to write but to be honest why I wanted to be in the magazine industry is beginning to be overshadowed by the feeling that I should have gone with my first love: teaching.

Becoming a teacher was always the "plan" growing up. I decided I wanted to teach the 3rd grade, when I was in about, oh the 3rd grade. I counseled at camp, babysat, and worked at the church nursery. Then when I was 16, a couple of friends and I took up teaching a 1st grade Sunday School class. I thought it would be glorious. It was hard. Guess what? Six year-olds can be tough, they don't have much of an attention span and a few of them could have cared less about this guy Jesus we kept talking about. And guess what? Sixteen year-olds (including myself, ahem) can be tough too and I got frustrated and figured that teaching wasn't for me because I wasn't patient enough.( I look back on that now and just wince. Of course I wasn't patient enough. I was sixteen, I could barely pay attention outside of movies and pep rallies. Sermons at church seemed endless. I can only hope that the last decade has taught me a little something about the virtue and if nothing else, dealing with staff members complaining about Sharpie marks on their chairs and not socking them in the face is a testament to this fact.) And that was the end of my teaching aspirations and a few years later, my writing bug had taken hold and I end up in the journalism program, which I really did love.

As you may noticed from the last few posts (or as Casey put it the other day,"I read your angry blog today." Yeesh) things have not been going great at work. Two years after graduation, I am still a glorified receptionist. Now don't get me wrong, I am more than willing to pay my dues but I am starting to wonder if I have a hit a proverbial wall, stuck in a spot that is very good for the company (a receptionist/office manager/writer/web editor at a very small salary) and not very good for me. I'm beat down, I'm angry and I am really tired of being take advantage of.

But perhaps maybe the most discouraging of all, I miss making a difference, I miss feeling like what I am doing matters. I miss watching children's eyes light up when they "get it". I miss having a purpose outside of directing phone calls. I want to serve God and I wonder if maybe he is calling me to do something else. Or maybe I just want to escape this situation and do something I really love. And man, I do love kids.

So there it is, my mid-20's crisis- to teach or not to teach? To hang on to the magazine dream or finally, finally let that one go? A part of me wants to wipe the slate clean and start over, to do something that I was maybe too scared to do 6 years ago. The other still desperately wants to be an editor at Seattle magazine. We'll see, but in the meantime, I am praying that God will give a clear-cut sign either way even if I have to wait for it, though it may test my newfound patience. All the more fitting because if I am going teach I'll probably need even more of that one.