As children we often dream of what career paths we’ll take in the future, but as we get older sometimes that decision becomes more difficult.
Throughout my early childhood a vision of mine was to be an actor. It was a simple career goal of mine watching actors and actresses display their elite acting skills on television.
Denzel Washington was a favorite actor of mine. He inspired me at ten years old with the movie he played a role in called ‘American Gangster’. It was such a good movie that I decided to take acting classes right after I watched it.
Acting out lines in front of my parents and siblings was always so fun to me.
There was a casting call that interested me, so it was at that moment I made a very important decision.
I enrolled in a lot of acting classes and tried to get my skills to a level that would be acceptable in a casting call.
My uncle was adamant when he asked me, “Is this what you really want to do?’
“Yes I want to do this,” I said.
When the time came for the casting call, it didn’t go as planned. After my performance one of the judges wasn’t sold on my skills. She didn’t like the way I portrayed a specific character for the show.
She said my lines were too forced and that it wouldn’t get viewers to appreciate the character.
Disappointment followed me until I decided on the next career that I wanted to pursue.
Since acting didn’t work out, law was something that sparked an interest in me.
My freshman year of high school was one for the books. Prosecutor and defense attorney jobs were introduced through my English and history classes.
In those classes it was easier for me in retrospect than other classes such as math, chemistry, biology and physics. Writing essays and learning about the history of the United States came as something that made me want to research articles and write more about them.
But when my father explained to me that being a lawyer is not some ordinary job, it dawned on me that he was right.
When I saw a sample Bar exam that lawyers took for them to get their law degree, I was in shock.
My exact response to my parents when they found out that I researched what lawyers had to go through before they became accredited was, “So after I graduate college I have to go through three more years of school?”
My dream to become a lawyer didn’t last long. It was scrapped with the other failed goal of being an actor.
Showing emotion was hard for me because even though I was accepting the fact that things weren’t working out, I knew that there was something out there for me.
My parents were supportive of me even through all the disappointments and failures that were going on in my life.
It wasn’t until my last year of high school that a realization awakened in me.
The career goals in the past that didn’t work out for me were just a stepping stone for me to figure out my true calling.
My parents kept hounding the fact that there will is something out there that I would fall in love with.
I was scrolling through CNN and E! News on a Saturday evening and Don Lemon’s show was aired on CNN. He was going through all the topics of his agenda for his show and I ran upstairs to my parents and told them to change the channel.
I paused the show with the remote and told them that having my own show while reporting on news, entertainment, and sports was exactly what I wanted to do .
Writing articles, researching and knowing what’s going on around me was something that you could do in relation to journalism.
Having my own show was not something that could just happen in a second but it could be built from the ground up with the experience in reporting.
Despite my shortcomings early on, I was able to find a home and discover what I was truly passionate about. It took awhile to find my true calling but once I found it, it immediately felt right.
