What I learnt from working in religion, writing for a glamour magazine and getting a PhD

It doesn’t matter how impressive your job title sounds, what glamorous things your work entails or how much prestige you have.

If your personal values, desires, wants and needs are being trampled on and disregarded, all of that fancy shit is just… shit.

I worked in:

• highly-controlled religious organisation
• a glossy glamorous magazine (and before that, one of Malaysia's largest English national daily newspapers)
• and the elite spaces of one of the UK’s top research universities

And although these are three very different places - religion, fashion/media, academia - the underlying cultures are very much the same:

Each have very specific rules and ideals for what it means to be a good, worthy, successful person.

There are 'golden rules' wherever you are - but none of them are absolute

In each of those spaces, there were unspoken guidelines for:

• how you should look
• how you should act
• what goals and aspirations you should have
• what behaviours are prized and celebrated
• what achievements are lauded.

And in every single place, those rules felt absolute.

In a fashion magazine, THIS is what it means to be a successful, worthy person!

(thinness, the right clothes, fair blemish-free skin, using the right products, in-depth knowledge of the latest designers / trends the who's who...)

In academia, THIS is what it means to be a successful, worthy person!

(to be published, to pass your PhD 'with no corrections', to roll from one academic research role into another, tenure...)

In religion, THIS is what it means to be a successful, worthy person - and not just in this lifetime but every future one!

(knowledge of all the religious texts, unquestioning devotion to your teachers, the ability to always put others before yourself, always knowing the wisest, most compassionate decision to make...)

And that’s all well and good if those ideals dovetail with what you truly want for your own life too - fashion expertise, academic prowess, enlightenment.

But here’s the thing: how unshakeably certain are you about what you trulymadlydeeply want for yourself

versus

all the messages you’ve absorbed about what we should want in all those respective worlds?

How do you fully untangle what you want from all the noise around you telling you what you should want?

The bottom line: what you want

For me, in every single job I’ve held - in fashion, religion, media and academia - it has always ultimately come down to the same thing:

• wanting to serve others in some way
• wanting to earn enough money to live comfortably and enjoy the things I love

That’s it. All the other trappings of academic prestige, my name up in lights in fancy bylines, fame, glamour, reputation, even spiritual enlightenment were all just distractions.

Or even worse, pressures that made me feel stuck and small and never good enough.

All this is to say:

untangle the deep-down core desires you hold for your life from all the noise of whatever space you happen to be in now.

Know that every single place in the world will have its own specific, exacting, demanding rules and definitions of success and value.

But also remember that, ultimately, they’re all actually made up by fickle humans; they're arbitrary and highly changeable.

And they don’t have to be yours.#

{Image: ZM / CanvaPro}