July 19, 2022 • 58 mins
In 2007 I quit my corporate job to pursue writing and performing full time...and promptly went broke. Over the years I learned some hard lessons on what it means to be an artist and an entrepreneur. Listen in to hear my rough and tumble journey to where my career is today and my tips for how to pursue your dreams whether you are working your dream job or not. Please enjoy this episode from the HER Archives.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
That time I'm at India Are. That time I went
on a really bad date. That time I was directed
by Robert Townting. That time I got Mono on Thanksgiving.
That time I went on a really bad Christmas tour.
(00:33):
That time I'm everyone, I welcome you to this week's
episode of Her with Aimana Brown, which will be story time.
That time I quit my job. So I feel like,
(00:56):
before I get to the actual moment when I quit
my job, I want to lay some groundwork as to
what led me to working in corporate America, because it
was a corporate job that I quit. Okay, I attended
Spellman College. Shout out to any Spellman Nights that are listening.
(01:18):
And my last year at Spellman was a very tough
time because Spellman is a very competitive school. Not competitive
in the sense that I felt like I was always
competing against my classmates, but competitive in the sense that
a lot of us who arrived to spell Men were
(01:40):
already really successful in school. Some of us already had
businesses or had started nonprofits and done you know, all
sorts of like amazing things. So it was sort of
that same experience when you got to your last year
that women were leaving Spellman to go on to do
(02:01):
really amazing things. They were getting admitted to these really
prestigious grad schools and going to partner with this and that,
you know, organization or company whatnot. So I was experiencing
the pressure of wondering what would be my cool thing
that I would have to say I was going to
(02:22):
do when I got out of school. And all I
knew was that I wanted to be a writer, but
I didn't really know where to start, and I was
mainly focused on novelists who had been successful, and the
main three that were in my head at the time
was Alice Walker, Tony Morrison, and Stephen King, all three
of whom really hit their stride as far as becoming,
(02:46):
you know, numerically successful when they were in there, maybe
at earliest their mid to late thirties and mostly early forties.
So I was sort of looking at them thinking, well,
here I am twenty two years old wanting to become
a six that's full, full time writer. I have no
idea where you start doing that, and maybe I need
(03:06):
to just find some stuff to do until I get
to my thirties or my forties, and maybe that's when
all the stuff happens. So all that to say, I
decided to apply to grad school because I thought grad
school would buy me some time to figure out what
in the world I was going to do. My plan
was to get a Master's of Fine Arts in poetry.
And those of you that are familiar know that when
(03:28):
you get in m f A, that's considered a terminal
degree in the sense that it's the highest degree you
can get in a performing art or visual art, any
type of art. Really, so I applied to grad school.
I was denied in m f A and poetry admittance.
(03:50):
I was denied to every school I applied to. I
moved in with my now best friend and her husband,
and I got a job at Smoothie King because my
friend Selita was working there at the time and probably
took some pity on me and was like, girl, let
me see if I can get you hired over here.
So this is my recent graduated from college life. Right well,
(04:15):
right as I'm working at Smoothie King and really in
this tizzy about what in the world is my future,
I get this amazing opportunity to do spoken word poetry
at a very large Christian college student event, and some
of you are listening like what. Well, in another part
(04:37):
of my life, a lot of my poetry career, as
far as what I got paid to do, a lot
of those opportunities came in predominantly white Christian environments. That
was not something that I thought was going to happen.
But this was my first foray into doing one of
those events, and it happened to be a pretty big event,
(04:58):
which gave me more exposure to people that were in
sort of church market world vibes. So I went from
working at Smoothie King not knowing what in the world
I was going to do, to traveling with this organization
and then getting invited by other churches and nonprofit organizations
(05:22):
and sort of doing that, but always working some sort
of side job or temp job in some way. It
was never enough money to really do that full time.
And then I got interested in arts journalism. So for
a while in my early twenties, I was juggling the road,
traveling to different Christian events and performing poetry they're doing
(05:46):
my little side job or temp job whatever I was
doing to really make steady money, and writing articles about
Atlanta's music scene. It was actually a very fun life,
especially the music scene parts because I was really able
to get free tickets to a lot of movies and
(06:06):
concerts and shows. I went to some of them by myself.
Sometimes I took a date. Sometimes I took a girlfriend
and we went and just hung out, and I just
had to write an article to pay my oppenance or
whatever for actually getting into the event for free. So
somewhere around maybe twenty four one of my temp jobs
actually turned permanent, and it was a receptionist job. And
(06:30):
if you are a writer of any kind, having a
receptionist job is one of the best jobs that you
can have, especially if it's a receptionist job where they
mainly want you to focus on the phones, which is
how this job was. I was working for a small business.
It was for a commercial realty company, so most everybody
(06:51):
else was handling any like paperwork and different things. I
didn't really have a lot of administrative tasks to do,
but they needed somebody who was going to be there
all the time I'm during office hours to answer the phone.
So I did that, and let's tell my age a
little bit, updated my MySpace page. You know. I had
to switch my top friends around and I would write
(07:12):
my articles from the night before I would typically go
out to a show or go to interview some artists
at some venue somewhere, and then I would have to
go back into work the next morning, in between phone calls.
That's what I do. So this was great for a while.
This was like my dream life for a while, until
I was starting to feel the financial pinch. Right, I'm
(07:33):
working as a receptionist, which didn't pay great, but paid
better than me working just temp jobs off and on.
We didn't pay great, and I was getting paid some
on the road, but the road wasn't regular either, and
I was getting paid a little bit to write articles,
but really not enough to survive. And I was starting
(07:56):
to get kind of antsy about that, and you know,
I really wanted to be writing and performing full time.
But in lieu of that, I was like, man, if
I could find a job where I could work in
my field, maybe that would make me feel, you know,
more fulfilled. So my best friend was working at a
fortunately company at the time, and she hit me up
(08:18):
and she was like, Hey, they're looking for writers to
hire here, and I was like, oh my gosh, Like
I didn't know anything about corporations hiring writers, So I
want you all to know that college me really didn't
see myself as a corporate America person. I just always
kind of felt like that doesn't really seem like my vibe.
(08:39):
So I didn't do any like internships or anything like that.
I didn't know anything really about how corporate America worked,
so didn't make any sense to me why they would
be hiring writers. But once I saw kind of the
range of salary, I was like, I'm interested. So those
of you that have worked a job and then and
(09:00):
wanted to apply an interview for another job know that
it's really tricky figuring out how you are going to
leave the one job and go interview at the other
place without tipping off your current job that you're interviewing.
And the only way that I could think to make
it make sense was to do the interview when I
(09:22):
was out from work, because I had my wisdom teeth
taken out. And as I'm telling y'all this, I'm like,
surely there was a smarter way to do this, Like,
surely I could have just maybe taken a day off
or something. But I think as a receptionist, I don't
think I had like vacation days or anything like that.
(09:43):
I think it was just like on a day that
I couldn't be at work to answer the phones, was
just a day I didn't get paid. So I don't
remember when I was working full time for that job
as a receptionist. I don't remember ever taking a day off.
But now I'm like, why didn't you just take a
day off and do the interview that day and go
back to work. But those of you that have done
(10:04):
this type of hustle before, it's like you feel like
everyone at work knows you took the interview. I think
I was maybe worried about that. Anyway, I got my
wisdom teeth taken out. I probably was on day three
or day four of recovery, so my cheeks and jaw
(10:26):
were still pretty swollen. But I took my pain medication
and I put on my best blazer and suit that
I had at the time and went and did the interview.
And I can't remember, y'all if the interview was in
two parts. I feel like maybe it was. I feel
(10:46):
like I had an initial interview with someone, and then
when I came back for the second interview, Oh no,
I remember. I think the first interview was just with
someone generally from HR, and of course I'm having to
explain to them that my face doesn't normally look like
this and that my voice doesn't normally sound this way
(11:08):
because I just had my wisdom teeth taken out. And
I think a week or so later, maybe I came
back for the second round of interviews, which was actually
with the person that was over the department I would
have been going into, and another manager from that department,
and y'all. The main thing that I remember about the
(11:30):
second round of interviews for this corporate job is the
manager of the department I was working in, which was
considered in this company employee communications. So we were basically
like I'm sure in some companies we probably would be
like where HR Communications was, because we were the department
(11:51):
that would have been writing anything could have been memos
to safety manuals. But also the company had its own
uh employee magazine and employee website, and so sometimes we
would get to write like human interest stories for things
like that. So when I get to this second round
(12:11):
of the interview, you know, they ask you all the
all the typical things you get asked in an interview
about your strengths and your weaknesses and times you had
to show leadership, and times you had to address conflict,
you know, and you try to like pull some answer
out of there about something that happened at summer camp, right,
And I remember the last question of the interview, my
(12:34):
what would have been my boss's boss's boss's boss asks me,
what makes you different than all of the other applicants
that we've seen, what should make us want to hire you?
And I drew a blank. I could not honestly think
of what to say, and I just said the first
thing that came to my mind. I said, I'm a
(12:57):
joy to work with. And they both laughed like big
laughs in the office, and then after they laughed and
I laughed a little bit too, but I was like, yeah,
I guess it is kind of funny, but like for real,
(13:18):
like really like I feel like anybody that works with
me would say they had a good time working with me.
So that was my calling card that they never forgot that.
That was my answer to the question. Bless my heart
today anyway, So I start this job. I think I
(13:40):
actually came back for a third time. And when I
came back to the office for the third time was
when I received the offer. And this is the only time,
because this is the only corporate job that I ever worked,
but this is the only time that I had that
moment where they had typed up the offer and it
was the folder and they like slid it across the table.
(14:03):
I mean, if I if I knew then what I
know now, I probably would have negotiated a little more.
But when I opened up that folder and saw the money,
I was like, I'm rich, I'm rich. This is wow, wow, wow,
all of that is going to be just for me. Wow.
(14:25):
It didn't even occur to me to push them back
and asked them for five thousand more, ten thousand more.
It's not none of that occurred to me. I just
looked at the money and I was like, oh my gosh.
And I think they had they had some element of
calculating what all of the benefits were worth as well.
And this was a large, very established, fortunate companies, so
(14:49):
they had a lot of like legacy type of benefits.
I mean, they had the four oh one K with
the up to three percent match, and they had the insurance.
They had like a mental health line that you could
call and get access to any mental health resources that
you needed. Like they had financial advising. I mean, it
was all the benefits everything. So I started working this job.
(15:16):
There were three other women also hired in my same position.
We were all hired into like an entry level We
were considered communications specialists, which meant we were entry level
writers coming into the company. One of the women of
the four of us, she was like legacy to the
company because she had been working for the company for
(15:37):
a while and been promoted from within, and then the
other three of us were coming in from the outside,
and y'all, I felt so professional. I mean, this was
like an old guard kind of company. So they wanted
you to be dressed in a blazer if you left
your cubicle. I think at the time that I was hired,
(15:58):
which was two thoul was in five. Women were not
allowed to dress bare legged at work. You had to
wear pantyhose, you had to wear close toe shoes. So
there were certain parts of it that I was excited
about because it just felt so grown up. I remember
(16:19):
going to the outlet mall with one of my girlfriends
to get my first, you know, a couple of suits,
so like that part felt very grown up. But the
whole pantyhose and the closed toe shoes. That was that
was wild because that was just starting to get really
uncomfortable really fast. And they were very like formal rules
about wearing your blazer. Like you weren't supposed to leave
(16:41):
your cubicle without wearing your blazer, but then if you
were sitting at your cubicle, you were allowed to wear
your blazer. At the time I was hired, the company
was actually resistant to you listening to music with headphones
at your desk. I'm sure some of you are listening.
Some of you that work in corporate are listening to
me right now, like this is wild. These were wild times, people,
(17:04):
and this was a company that probably was ten to
twenty years behind what a lot of companies had come
to with casual fridays and allowing people to dress more casually.
So for the first six months or so, I can't
say it was my dream job, but I was very
happy to be getting paid to write. That was getting
(17:25):
paid pretty well. I was able to afford an apartment
of my own, you know, I was just fully paying
for all of my things. Any concert that I wanted
to go to, I could go to it. You know,
I was all ready for that. I was very excited
about it. I think as time went on, I got
about six months in before I realized I hated that job.
(17:49):
And there's a couple of signs that happened to you
when you hate your job. I started to get like
a burning sensation in my stomach. Sunday nights, like Sunday
nights would come and I was just like, oh gosh,
I would have to give myself a talk about why
I'm going to go to this job. I remember, um
Kanye West's album Graduation came out while I was working
(18:12):
in that job, and I I had to like find
some music to listen to on my way to work
to motivate me to remember why I'm here trying to
do this job, and I hope it helps my career.
It was just slowly losing its allure because I don't
(18:34):
know what I expected when they said they were hiring writers.
I think I was hoping for something that was going
to feel, you know, like a little bit of journalism
and have sould to it. But this was a company
that was their business was very centered in supply chain,
you know, So it wasn't like I was working for
a company that was very centered on creativity. They were
(18:56):
centered on engineering and logistics and technology. They were not
centered on you writing flowery things for anything. So it
turned out that a lot of what I thought was
going to be some creative writing that could challenge me,
some journalistic writing, a lot of it was actually taking
(19:17):
things that other people had written ten or twenty years
before and just adding little tweaks and updates to it.
That was basically my job. And I was bored to
death and feeling very disillusioned about the whole thing. The
other thing that was happening that made me go, you
don't need to maybe work here anymore. So I remember
one of my managers he pulled me into his cubicle
(19:41):
and he was like, please sit down, and so I
sit down and he's like, why do you ask so
many questions? Anybody who knows me very well knows that
I have questions about just about everything, but in particular
with writing, because I'm always like, well, why are we
writing this? And who are we writing this too? And
(20:02):
why are we being asked to write it this way?
I remember asking him one time, is this propaganda that
you're asking me to write? And he said to me, Amina,
stop asking so many questions and just right, just don't
think about it so much and just finish the task
at hand. And I walked back to my cubicle and
(20:24):
realized I didn't know how to do that as a writer,
and didn't want to know how to do that. I
didn't want to know how to separate my soul from writing.
And that was when I realized that I needed to
come up with an exit plan. Here's something else interesting
that happened when I was at that job that really
(20:45):
really informed a lot of my choice to quit. So
there was a black woman manager in our department, and
she was very much like a workaholic type personality. She
was one of those people that like when she was
at work, she gets the job done, but also like,
you know, if you email her something Saturday morning, she's
(21:06):
going to email you back, like she was on her
job like that. And then she got pregnant. Remember she
got pregnant. Remember she had her baby, And I remember
when she came back to work, she was totally different.
She had changed, and people were expecting her to be
(21:29):
available to them all the time. They were expecting her
to work fifty and sixty hours, you know a week.
They were expecting her to make herself accessible to them
all the time like she had before, and she just
didn't want to because she had gotten married and had
this baby and she wanted to be with her family more.
(21:54):
And I wasn't close to her, and I never talked
to her about it. I just remember watching her, you know,
I mean now thinking about it. She was probably in
her mid thirties to maybe early forties, and I'm watching
her and watching her negotiate things like those of you
that work in corporate are familiar with f m l A,
(22:15):
which is the Family Medical Leaf Act, And when you
work in corporate, at least at that time, things may
be different now, But when you worked in corporate then
you had a limited amount of time that you could
take off, you know, in the case that you had
a baby or had other reasons to need to take
fm l A. And watching her need the time to
(22:36):
really take off, but watching her worry about her job
security and probably coming back sooner than she wished. She
had to write. And so I'm observing all of this,
and I made this internal promised to myself there in
my mid twenties, and I promised myself that you know,
(22:57):
here I was, I wasn't married, I'm not even sure
I was dating anyone at this point. Um I didn't
have any children, and I promised myself that by the
time I was thirty, I wanted to be writing and
doing my art full time. And a part of my
reason for doing that was because if I were to
(23:18):
get married and decide to have children, I wanted to
have freedom. I didn't want my corporate job to be
able to tell me, you know, what I had to do.
And that was when it really started churning in me,
like you're gonna have to leave this job. You gotta
figure out how you're going to do that. So I
(23:39):
worked the job almost two years, and in the meantime,
I'm using all my vacation days to take gigs out
of town. And there were times that requests would come
in for me to perform at different events and I
had to say no because it was a Wednesday in
the middle of the week and it would be too
awkward for this if I had going on at work
(24:01):
for me to take that gig out of town in
the middle of the week. Of course, to me, it
felt like there were just tons of gigs I had
to say no to. It probably was not tons. It
was probably five or less. But all of those times
that I had to say no because I was working
this job I didn't like. It just burned me up.
So every year around Christmas, we would get a Christmas
(24:24):
or holiday bonus, and the holiday bonus was basically like
a third paycheck. So you were already getting your two
paychecks a year. Every year that I worked there, I
got a little bit of a raise, and then you
were getting this third check. And I don't know why.
Maybe by this time I had just become so dissatisfied
(24:47):
with the job, and I felt like I was missing
out on all these opportunities to really do what I
wanted to do for a living. I just decided, when
I get this Christmas bonus whenever hits my account, as
soon as it clears in my account, I'm going to
put in my two week notice. And I did put
in my two week notice. Feedback about that decision from
(25:10):
my coworkers was very mixed. Some of my coworkers were like,
I know, you'll make it, You'll do great, you know.
Some of them were a little bit familiar with some
of the other things I was doing, like outside of work,
performing and stuff. Some of them were like, I wish
I could do what you're doing, but I just stay
in this job, you know, for the benefits for my family,
(25:32):
or for my health or what have you. And some people,
honestly were just like, this is the dumbest thing you
can do. And they were just like, you finally got
a job with a company that basically doesn't fire anyone. Incorporate,
they don't fire anyone, you know. They were like, now,
can't say what the other parts of the workforce experienced there,
(25:53):
but in corporate it was very rare that they ever
did furloughs or layoffs, you know. So they were like,
you basically got a job that you could keep until
you retire. Why would you leave here on some fleeting
dream of being a writer. And of course, as I
say it out loud, it does sound fleeting, But to
my then twenty seven year old self, it didn't sound
(26:17):
fleeting at all. So I quit. I still remember waking
up with anxiety that January, realizing that I was working
for myself and I didn't have a boss, and I
just kept waking up with anxiety because there wasn't anyone
to tell me what to do every day. I also
(26:39):
was like waiting for all the requests to come in.
You know, I was like, where are all the emails? Hey, everybody,
I'm available. Well, let's have a little less than in economics,
shall we. Because I quit my job December of two
thousand seven, and what happened in two thousand eight the
market tanked everyone, Guests who didn't study economics, Guests who
(27:04):
didn't even know the market was tanking at the time. Okay,
So all that to say, mainly the arena that I
was working in at that time. I was performing in
predominantly Christian, white conservative settings. Okay. So these were mostly,
(27:26):
if not all, nonprofit organizations that I was working with,
So their budgets got hit too. They don't have the
extra money to be paying for a poet to be
coming to talk about anything. So I had no invitations
to speak, no gigs, very little money. And then I
fell in love. And no, y'all, not with my husband.
(27:49):
I fell in love with this other man. All of
this story I'm telling y'all is before I met my husband. Okay,
So I fell in love with this man. And now
that I think about the timing of this, I fell
(28:12):
in love with this man that was kind of like
I can only describe our friendship as it was sort
of like a flirty friendship that the two of us had.
We you know, we're both performing artists. He was a
lot more established in his career than me, but you know,
we had met out like in the performing artist scene
in Atlanta, try dating. Decided to just let that be friends.
(28:37):
But even though we had said the words out loud,
let's be friends, it really wasn't like that. When we
would see each other, even though we both dated other
people with see each other all the time, there was
just this like electricity still there. So I think maybe
because I had more free time. Now I know that
wasn't really free time. That was actually time that I
(28:58):
should have been building my busin this but you know,
you live, you learn. Because I had more free time
and because I had a big crush on him, we
started hanging out more. And then we're like, Okay, you're single,
I'm single. We've always been toyed around with this idea,
let's date. So we date, and look, I'm head over
heels in love with the man. If he says he
(29:19):
want to watch Netflix and hang out all day, sure,
If he wants to go bowling, great, If he wants
to catch a movie in the middle of the week,
in the middle of the day. I'm saying yes to that.
He can do some of these things because he's more
established than I am. He's making more money than I
am at the time. So when he's like, hey, let's
go chill, let's after he's done, you know, a big
(29:41):
project for a client and he's getting paid, I'm going
months and months and months no pay. Right, Well, we
try the dating thing and after a few months discover
this isn't working. More so that he discovered, let's be honest,
more so that he discovered it wasn't wor working for him,
and I just had to be like, yeah, okay, yeah,
(30:03):
well I have to accept that thing. So right at
the time that he and I are going through the
breakup time, and when I say he and I really
mean me because I don't know that he was like
struggling or suffering in any way after that breakup. I
was quite heartbroken over it at the time. And right
(30:24):
around the time that we go through this, like we're
not gonna be dating each other, and I'm just like
in my you know, destitute breakup time. You know, any
of you that have been through that type of destitute breakup.
It's like you're wearing the sweats, you don't remember the
last time you shower. You're just like eating food and
crying a little bit, probably crying a lot. That's what
(30:45):
it was like around this time. I'm also realizing that
I'm going broke because I didn't really have any savings
going into this decision to quit my corporate job. I
didn't really have the savings. All I had was that
extra check, and that wasn't going to carry me very far.
(31:06):
So I'm going broke. There are bills that are do
that I'm not able to pay them. I'm living in
an apartment I can no longer afford. My car gets repossessed.
I have to borrow money from family members and friends
to get my car out of repossession. I have to
move out of my cute little one bedroom apartment. Those
(31:28):
of you that live in Atlanta, I had a cute
one bedroom apartment in Vinings. It is just the cutest
little neighborhood. I mean, I had to give up that
little apartment get that car back out of repossession. A
friend of a friend opened up her home to me.
I moved in with her and rented out a bedroom
and a bathroom from her, and I think, I think
(31:53):
in that moment, I'm feeling like a failure, honestly, because
I think it had not even been a year. I'm
trying to think, had it even been a year. Maybe
it had been a year, maybe a little over a year,
(32:14):
And there I was just broke and struggling. And that
was not in the script that I had developed for
myself that when you are watching the movie about the
girl who quits her corporate job, I mean, she has
a few scenes where she cries and things don't go well,
but then like something really amazing happens to her and
(32:37):
then everything works out fine. And I was not experiencing
the works out fine. I felt like a failure. I
felt embarrassed that I had seemed so confident in my
choice to quit my job. So I felt a lot
of feelings about that time and feeling like a big failure,
(32:59):
and also so feeling like I didn't know how to
talk to God. And for me not only having grown
up in a Christian context, but I grew up in
like a charismatic Pentecostal Christian context, it was very much like,
(33:19):
you know, we have faith we believe these things like
these things happen, and so I think even believing that
way in the context of where like my Christian faith
was at the time, made accepting this moment very hard
because I not only felt like a failure, but then
I was questioning like, did I cause this? Did God
(33:41):
air quote speak to me and tell me to do this?
Was it the right thing? Was the wrong thing? And
I remember going through a long period of time after
I had moved out of my apartment and moved in
with my then housemate, and on top of that, I
had started working a customers urfast job because I was
I was broke in order for me to pay rent
(34:03):
to her, you know, I was gonna have to work somewhere,
and the gigs had dried up to the point that
I didn't even know if I would ever have more
of a career doing spoken word. So I found out
that this company was hiring customer service associates, and it
was like a big kind of like cattle call thing,
(34:24):
and all of us that were broke, we win and
you filled out all this stuff and then you had
so many weeks of training, but they really didn't have
a lot of choice time frames for the training. So
the one that they had mostly available was four pm
to one am in the morning, and so I did
(34:45):
my training. I think the training was six weeks and
it was paid training, so there were there were a
lot of people who were not intending to stay at
that job, but they were intending to finish. There's six
weeks training and get paid and then like move on
and do something else. I remember my birthday that year.
I was so broke, and everyone else and my training
(35:08):
class was so broke that when my birthday came, I
had to work on my birthday and they bought the
hostess cupcakes from the vending machine and put coffee stirs
inside of the cupcakes and saying happy birthday to me,
and I blew onto the coffee stirs as if they
(35:28):
had candles, right, And working in that job was humbling
one because again, you know, I'm dealing with just feeling
like I failed at trying to do my artist's career
and and being back to working, especially after having worked
a corporate job which paid well and had all the
(35:48):
good benefits and now being back to you know, working
a much lower amount per hour, not having any benefits
at all. Basically It's like, the amount of time you
show up here is the amount of time that you're
gonna get paid for, and when you don't show up,
you don't get paid. There were no vacation days, there
was no four oh one k there was none of
that stuff. And working that job really, in a way,
(36:13):
I think it gave me the time to myself to
really process what was happening. It was also hard for
me because I had a very you know, nice social
life at the time, and once I started working in
that corporate job, I was missing everything. Everyone's birthday parties
and all the cool shows we would have gone to.
I really just was going to work and coming home
(36:36):
and the time that I had as free time, all
the rest of my friends were at work, And in
a way, me having that time alone number one, I
think it helped me to give myself time to process
all that had happened. The stress of the breakup, the
going broke, the you know, having to ask my family
members for money. I'm an oldest kid, I'm I'm very
(36:58):
like I would rather shoulder it all on my shoulders
than have to ask, you know, my parents for money.
So I had to be in dire straight to do that,
and it was very humbling to go to them and
ask them, and I finally had after like three months
of working the job. I finished the training. And then
(37:19):
after you finished training, there were certain positions available on
the floor, but most of the positions that were available
were at the least desirable time at night. So I
stayed on the four pm to one am shift and
just worked there once I finished my training, And I
think after working that job, when I hit that three
(37:40):
four month time frame, I started to realize that I
needed to surrender. And surrender is a word I really
hate for various reasons. Is not a word I love.
In in the context of my Christian faith, Surrendering means
(38:02):
you are saying to God that you trust God with
your life. And I hate that. I just I just
hate it, y'all. I hate it because you're asking me
to trust my life to someone that I can't see,
(38:24):
and to trust my life to someone whose decisions I
question sometimes. But in my relationship to God, feeling like
I do trust that God knows better than I do,
so I do want to surrender to God these expectations,
(38:47):
these things. But I think also inherent in the word
surrender is letting go of what our expectations may have been.
And I thought I was going to be like a
shooting star after quitting my corporate job. I thought all
these amazing opportunities were just going to fall at my feet.
I thought I wasn't going to have to work that hard, honestly,
(39:08):
And so the other element of surrendering that I had
to do was sort of letting go of those expectations.
And just that was my first time in a long
time just sort of opening my hands to life and saying,
you know, hey, this is what I thought I was
supposed to do. I thought I was supposed to perform poetry.
I thought I was supposed to be a writer. Maybe
that's not it. Maybe there's something else for me. But
(39:31):
whatever it is, you know, I was just saying, in
my own prayer, out of my soul to God, whatever
it is that you have planned for my life, you
know I want to do that more than I want
to meet up to some expectations I made up somewhere.
And I'll tell you what's interesting. When you get to
(39:51):
a place, it's it's kind of weird, y'all, Because I
get really leery of people being like and as soon
as I prayed that prayer, here comes this opportunity, or
as soon as I, you know, surrender this thing, here
comes this You know. I really don't think life is
that clean cut of an equation. I think there will
(40:14):
be plenty of times that you may pray the prayer,
you may surrender the thing, and you may still have
to go on and not see this like huge, big change.
But at the same time, and this is what was
true for me in this moment. I think also when
we come upon a sense of openness inside of ourselves
(40:38):
and we become open to the fluidity of life, we
become open to the fact that our happiness doesn't have
to look one way, or our approach to our vocation
doesn't have to look one way. I think that does,
in this very spiritual sense, open us up to the
(41:00):
possibilities of life. And I do think there is this,
you know, energy out in the world that like when
you do that act of surrendering, whether that you know,
looks like it did for me and my Christian faith,
or whatever that looks like for you in however you
practice spirituality, like I do think there's something powerful about
(41:23):
the act of being open handed about one's life that
can open you up to the opportunities to come. I
don't think it means you know this plus this equals this,
you know, but I do think it opens you up
to that. And so after I had that moment, I'm
still like working my job. Get to the point that
I worked there long enough to choose a different shift
(41:44):
so I was able to work during the day, and
I start getting some calls like out of the blue
to you know, perform at a college here or there,
perform at a church here or there. And I'm just
taking in, you know, the gigs as they come. I've
been I've been doing nothing but working. So I was
paying down my debts and building up my savings and
(42:04):
sort of taking the money that I was making whenever
I did get a gig and just acting like I
didn't get it, just banking it and putting it in
savings and only living off of the money that I
was making at my job. And I get this call
to do this particular event. They were having a tenure
anniversary and their theme for the event was on your Mark.
(42:28):
And I remember being on the conference call as they're
like telling me, you know, the different things about the
theme and They're like, oh, we'd love for you to
write accustomed poem to open our event. And I was
listening and almost started to cry on the call because
as they were talking about the theme, and you know,
what do we do and we feel like we've missed
(42:49):
the mark. I mean, I just felt like they knew
my life somehow, you know. And I remember working on
that poem and writing that poem from such a tender
place because I actually really did feel those feelings and
putting my own questions and my own uncertainties and doubts
(43:09):
into the piece. And I remember when I went to
do the sound check, I didn't realize how big of
an event it was. So at that time, the event
was in this arena in Atlanta, and the arena could
see like twelve thousand people. And I'm one of those
people that sometimes when big opportunities come to me, I
(43:30):
sort of like psyched myself out and I'm like, it's
doesn't have to be that big of a deal. It's
not that big of a deal. Like I do that
to myself all the time, And so I started giving
myself that story. Like when I walked into the arena,
I was like, oh, then I was like, it's okay,
you're you know, you're just opening the event. You know,
there's lots of people are going to speak and perform.
It's not it's not that big of a deal. It
(43:50):
was totally that big of a deal, y'all. Okay. So
I came back the next day perform this piece that
I had written at the opening. Remember, I came out
into the lobby of the arena because I was actually
looking for a friend of mine that I was trying
to meet up with, and all these people like walk
up to me, they're they're giving me their business cards. I,
(44:11):
for the record, have no business cards. Um, I have
no CDs that I can remember to sell. At that point,
I'm just there with like, y'all. To be utterly honest,
I had a little many legal pad where the pages
looked like clouds. Okay, that is all. I had that
(44:34):
in a wallet to my name. That's it. All these
people came up wanting to write down their information in
my notebook, stuffing their business cards into my notebook. And
I went home that week and from that event, I
got so many invitations to speak that there wasn't gonna
be a way to take them all. And still work
my job. I've been working, and I had been saving
(44:56):
money for the times that inevitably come where you don't
have gigs come in, and so I quit my job
again January of I think would have been two thousand ten. Yeah,
I quit my job again January of two thousand and ten.
(45:18):
But this time, I feel like I quit my job
much better. I was more prepared for the ups and
downs of what it really means to be a full
time artist. I've saved up money, I had decreased my
debt I was I was really living on less, you know.
I had decreased my expenses as well. So I went
(45:39):
into the second time quitting with a much more business mind.
So that time I quit my job for good. I've
never had to again pick up a job like a
forty hour a week job. I've been full time as
a performing artist as a writer since then. Here are
(46:01):
my takeaways I wanted to share with you because prior
to the pandemic, I would get questions all the time
when I would travel and people would be like, Oh,
I hate my job. I really want to be doing this,
and they would like fill in the blank with whatever
their dream was. I really want to be doing that
and I'm just so tired of my job and think
I think I'm just going to quit and just start
And I would be like, no, no, no, don't, don't
(46:24):
quit your day job yet. And I know the stakes
are different now. You know. Even for a lot of
my friends that had been doing very well, you know,
speaking performing doing things that require you to be in
front of an audience, you know, all of us experienced
this big shift in trying to think about, Okay, well
(46:46):
what does that look like? Now? You know what does
all of that mean? But even in the midst of
a pandemic, even in the midst of really hard times,
it doesn't mean that we cease to have dreams or
see us to have things that were passionate about. So
I want to tell you if you are currently working
a job where you are you know, feeling that like
(47:10):
you know, in your stomach on Sunday nights before starting
work on Monday, where you are having to give yourself
a big pep talk before you get on any of
these zoom meetings, I want you to not quit your
day job just yet. Before you quit save money. That's
one piece of advice I would have gone back to
(47:32):
give myself when I worked corporate, I was really making
more money than I knew what to do with. And
if I could do anything all over, I would go
back and just save money, you know, not just blow
through it. Save the money, stack the money. If you
are going to do anything that's a dream of yours
as a vocation, you will inevitably go through times that
(47:55):
will be more lean, where you won't have as much
money coming in. Even the success stories that you read
about are very rarely just this linear experience where they
just start from nothing and whoop, everything goes well. That's
actually very rare that that happens. A lot of it
is not very linear. It's a lot of starts and stops.
(48:15):
It's a lot of feast and famine. You're going to
experience both sides of that. So save money, get out
of debt as much as you can. Use the job
that you're working that you may hate right now, use
it to help you fuel your dreams. Some of us
are going to be privileged enough that we have you know,
family members or parents that can give us that seed
(48:37):
money to get started, or have an inheritance we can
lean on. But most of us won't have that. Most
of us will be our own inheritance. Really we we
will be the ones that will put together that initial
you know, seed money for ourselves. So do those things,
also write a business plan. Dreams can be very emotional,
(48:58):
and that also means that sometimes our ego and our
value and worthiness can get all tied up in our
dreams and if we achieve our dreams and wanting people
to applaud us in different things. But dreams are not
just emotional things. If you want your dream to actually
(49:18):
become a reality, you need a plan, and I think
a basic business plan is a great place to start.
There are tons of great business planning books. But I
also like to say, you know, you don't have to
start just like spending money to get your business started.
There are so many great resources, even online that won't
(49:40):
cost you anything. There's the library where you can go
and check out some of those books. But at least
get yourself a basic template for a business plan and
fill it out. Even if you're a performing artist, even
if you're like but I make pottery, yeah, fill out
the business plan. You're a dancer, you're a choreographer, yes,
fill out your business plan. You do visual art, yep,
(50:02):
you fill out a business plan. I know, especially for
those of us that are doing creative work, business plans
can feel corporate and can feel like non intuitive to us.
But even those of us that are arts connoisseurs and
our creatives and make art as well, there will still
(50:24):
be business involved. If you intend for this to be
what is helping you make a living, there will still
be contracts to sign, and you'll have to decide on
what your rates are and if those rates are really
equal to the time that it actually takes you to
make what you're making. So becoming a full time artists
(50:45):
or whatever your dream is to do full time it
also means becoming a business person. And I think if
you're prepared for that, um, then you're better better off
and better suited to actually survive it in the long run.
And I also want to speak to this, being a
full time artist isn't everything. And that's not me being
(51:11):
self deprecating. It's not me doing the thing where sometimes
when someone is, you know, doing well in a particular
area of their life, then they start to sort of
downplay it and be like, well, let me tell you
all the things that are actually really bad about it.
That's not me saying that what I mean is whatever
(51:33):
your dream is, it doesn't have to be your vocation.
And I think sometimes we make a pedestal of our
dream becoming our job, and it doesn't always have to
be that way. I love what I do. I've been
full time doing this. Oh my gosh, it will be
(51:54):
eleven years this year, and I had to remind myself
end of last year and into this year that part
of the reason why I wanted to become a full
time artist was for freedom. And the day that this
is no longer freedom to me, then it's okay. If
(52:14):
I decide I want to go back and work for
someone else, it's okay. If I decide I want to
go back into corporate America or wherever I find myself going.
You know, I've learned over this journey to not put
pressure on how a thing has to look. That it's
most important that the core part of what I'm doing
(52:35):
and why I'm doing it are still there. And truth
be told, there are so many people who honestly are
never going to do their dream full time, and they
make a conscious choice. Sometimes sometimes it's what they have
to do for survival. They have to work that job.
So that it can pay their bills, so they can
(52:57):
take care of their family members or whatever. So it
doesn't mean that a person with a dream is a
failure because they don't do that dream as their job.
And I wish I heard more people saying that honestly,
because I feel like society can put society and capitalism,
(53:18):
to be honest, can put this pressure on you that
everything you dream, it's not real. You're not dedicated to
it if it's not what you do for your job.
And there are plenty of people who are doing their
dream for their job and they're burnt out and it's
affecting their health because they wish that maybe they were
working somewhere else and doing their dream on the side.
(53:40):
I think what's most important is that you find something
that you love and do that as often as you can.
And for some people that's gonna be once a year.
You know, there's gonna be some people that get an
opportunity to just right once a year, and for some
people it's a few times a year. And for some people,
(54:00):
you know, they'll do what they love every week and
work this job that isn't really their jam, but it's
the job that fuels their ability to do their dream.
So don't let anybody put pressure on you either way.
Don't let anybody put pressure on you that your dream
has to be your job. And if you're working your
dream job and it's no longer your dream anymore, you're
(54:25):
not a failure for changing. You're not a failure for
deciding to do different things. Find something you love, and
do it some of the time as much of the
time as you can. Anyway. I hope you all enjoyed
this edition of that time. I I hope you think
(54:45):
about whatever your dream is. I know we're in a pandemic,
and I know some of our dreams probably feel even
further away than they did before, But it doesn't mean
that that has to be the end of the story
of your dream. Give up on your dream, and don't
put pressure on yourself for your dream to look one
particular way. If there's anything, I hope you walk away
(55:08):
from our story time together, I hope you walk away
thinking about how you can approach your life more open handed,
how you can find a rhythm of surrender, whether that
is in your relationship with God, if that's what you believe,
or whether it's in your relationship to yourself. Thank you
(55:32):
all so much for just you know, coming into the
living room and taking off your shoes, bringing your snacks,
hanging out with me while we have a little story time.
And I hope as I'm sharing my story that maybe
it reminds you of some of your own story too.
I hope it sparks some conversation with you, maybe among
your friends or your co workers at that job you hate.
(55:56):
Isn't it funny that you can have a job you
hate and still of the people you work with. And
I guess you can also have a job you love
and not really enjoy the people you work with. So
you gotta find some enjoyment wherever you can. Okay, Hey,
if you have more questions or other things that came
to your mind that you want to know about what
it's like to see dreams become reality, I would love
(56:19):
to address them here on the podcast. So I am
inviting you to slide into my d MS, not with
any of that you know stuff where those men will
be on there trying to be your sugar daddy. Don't
slide into my d MS with that, but slide into
my d MS if you have any questions or feedback
about this. You can follow me and my d M
(56:39):
s at Amina b e E on Instagram and Twitter.
I would love to engage with you there get some
feedback from you here If there are any follow up
questions I can address in another episode. For this week's
edition of Give Her a Crown, I want to give
a crown to my mom, Jean Brown. My mom raised
(57:00):
to my sister and me as a single mom, and
now that I'm a grown woman, I know it was
harder for her than I could have known it was
as a child. My mom has survived so many things,
and she raised my sister and I to be free
thinking women. And my mom worked her dream job. She
wanted to be a nurse ever since she was a
(57:20):
little girl, so she became one. She was actually finishing
nursing school with me in her belly, and despite the
racism that she encountered that tried to keep her from succeeding,
she became a neo natal nurse and is still in
her nursing career. She never put pressure on me to
get married or to have kids. She only encouraged me
(57:42):
to achieve my dreams and to get an education. If
it weren't for her, I wouldn't be here talking to
y'all today. To my mom Jean Brown, give her a crown.
That time I met India are Ye. That time I
went on a really bad date. That time I was
(58:07):
directed by Robert Townsend. That time I got Mono on Thanksgiving.
That time I went on a really bad Christmas tour.
That time I'm I Heard with Amina Brown is produced
by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part
of the Seneca Women Podcast Network and partnership with I
(58:29):
Heart Radio. Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe, rate,
and review the podcast.
That time I'm at India Are. That time I went
on a really bad date. That time I was directed
by Robert Townting. That time I got Mono on Thanksgiving.
That time I went on a really bad Christmas tour.
(00:33):
That time I'm everyone, I welcome you to this week's
episode of Her with Aimana Brown, which will be story time.
That time I quit my job. So I feel like,
(00:56):
before I get to the actual moment when I quit
my job, I want to lay some groundwork as to
what led me to working in corporate America, because it
was a corporate job that I quit. Okay, I attended
Spellman College. Shout out to any Spellman Nights that are listening.
(01:18):
And my last year at Spellman was a very tough
time because Spellman is a very competitive school. Not competitive
in the sense that I felt like I was always
competing against my classmates, but competitive in the sense that
a lot of us who arrived to spell Men were
(01:40):
already really successful in school. Some of us already had
businesses or had started nonprofits and done you know, all
sorts of like amazing things. So it was sort of
that same experience when you got to your last year
that women were leaving Spellman to go on to do
(02:01):
really amazing things. They were getting admitted to these really
prestigious grad schools and going to partner with this and that,
you know, organization or company whatnot. So I was experiencing
the pressure of wondering what would be my cool thing
that I would have to say I was going to
(02:22):
do when I got out of school. And all I
knew was that I wanted to be a writer, but
I didn't really know where to start, and I was
mainly focused on novelists who had been successful, and the
main three that were in my head at the time
was Alice Walker, Tony Morrison, and Stephen King, all three
of whom really hit their stride as far as becoming,
(02:46):
you know, numerically successful when they were in there, maybe
at earliest their mid to late thirties and mostly early forties.
So I was sort of looking at them thinking, well,
here I am twenty two years old wanting to become
a six that's full, full time writer. I have no
idea where you start doing that, and maybe I need
(03:06):
to just find some stuff to do until I get
to my thirties or my forties, and maybe that's when
all the stuff happens. So all that to say, I
decided to apply to grad school because I thought grad
school would buy me some time to figure out what
in the world I was going to do. My plan
was to get a Master's of Fine Arts in poetry.
And those of you that are familiar know that when
(03:28):
you get in m f A, that's considered a terminal
degree in the sense that it's the highest degree you
can get in a performing art or visual art, any
type of art. Really, so I applied to grad school.
I was denied in m f A and poetry admittance.
(03:50):
I was denied to every school I applied to. I
moved in with my now best friend and her husband,
and I got a job at Smoothie King because my
friend Selita was working there at the time and probably
took some pity on me and was like, girl, let
me see if I can get you hired over here.
So this is my recent graduated from college life. Right well,
(04:15):
right as I'm working at Smoothie King and really in
this tizzy about what in the world is my future,
I get this amazing opportunity to do spoken word poetry
at a very large Christian college student event, and some
of you are listening like what. Well, in another part
(04:37):
of my life, a lot of my poetry career, as
far as what I got paid to do, a lot
of those opportunities came in predominantly white Christian environments. That
was not something that I thought was going to happen.
But this was my first foray into doing one of
those events, and it happened to be a pretty big event,
(04:58):
which gave me more exposure to people that were in
sort of church market world vibes. So I went from
working at Smoothie King not knowing what in the world
I was going to do, to traveling with this organization
and then getting invited by other churches and nonprofit organizations
(05:22):
and sort of doing that, but always working some sort
of side job or temp job in some way. It
was never enough money to really do that full time.
And then I got interested in arts journalism. So for
a while in my early twenties, I was juggling the road,
traveling to different Christian events and performing poetry they're doing
(05:46):
my little side job or temp job whatever I was
doing to really make steady money, and writing articles about
Atlanta's music scene. It was actually a very fun life,
especially the music scene parts because I was really able
to get free tickets to a lot of movies and
(06:06):
concerts and shows. I went to some of them by myself.
Sometimes I took a date. Sometimes I took a girlfriend
and we went and just hung out, and I just
had to write an article to pay my oppenance or
whatever for actually getting into the event for free. So
somewhere around maybe twenty four one of my temp jobs
actually turned permanent, and it was a receptionist job. And
(06:30):
if you are a writer of any kind, having a
receptionist job is one of the best jobs that you
can have, especially if it's a receptionist job where they
mainly want you to focus on the phones, which is
how this job was. I was working for a small business.
It was for a commercial realty company, so most everybody
(06:51):
else was handling any like paperwork and different things. I
didn't really have a lot of administrative tasks to do,
but they needed somebody who was going to be there
all the time I'm during office hours to answer the phone.
So I did that, and let's tell my age a
little bit, updated my MySpace page. You know. I had
to switch my top friends around and I would write
(07:12):
my articles from the night before I would typically go
out to a show or go to interview some artists
at some venue somewhere, and then I would have to
go back into work the next morning, in between phone calls.
That's what I do. So this was great for a while.
This was like my dream life for a while, until
I was starting to feel the financial pinch. Right, I'm
(07:33):
working as a receptionist, which didn't pay great, but paid
better than me working just temp jobs off and on.
We didn't pay great, and I was getting paid some
on the road, but the road wasn't regular either, and
I was getting paid a little bit to write articles,
but really not enough to survive. And I was starting
(07:56):
to get kind of antsy about that, and you know,
I really wanted to be writing and performing full time.
But in lieu of that, I was like, man, if
I could find a job where I could work in
my field, maybe that would make me feel, you know,
more fulfilled. So my best friend was working at a
fortunately company at the time, and she hit me up
(08:18):
and she was like, Hey, they're looking for writers to
hire here, and I was like, oh my gosh, Like
I didn't know anything about corporations hiring writers, So I
want you all to know that college me really didn't
see myself as a corporate America person. I just always
kind of felt like that doesn't really seem like my vibe.
(08:39):
So I didn't do any like internships or anything like that.
I didn't know anything really about how corporate America worked,
so didn't make any sense to me why they would
be hiring writers. But once I saw kind of the
range of salary, I was like, I'm interested. So those
of you that have worked a job and then and
(09:00):
wanted to apply an interview for another job know that
it's really tricky figuring out how you are going to
leave the one job and go interview at the other
place without tipping off your current job that you're interviewing.
And the only way that I could think to make
it make sense was to do the interview when I
(09:22):
was out from work, because I had my wisdom teeth
taken out. And as I'm telling y'all this, I'm like,
surely there was a smarter way to do this, Like,
surely I could have just maybe taken a day off
or something. But I think as a receptionist, I don't
think I had like vacation days or anything like that.
(09:43):
I think it was just like on a day that
I couldn't be at work to answer the phones, was
just a day I didn't get paid. So I don't
remember when I was working full time for that job
as a receptionist. I don't remember ever taking a day off.
But now I'm like, why didn't you just take a
day off and do the interview that day and go
back to work. But those of you that have done
(10:04):
this type of hustle before, it's like you feel like
everyone at work knows you took the interview. I think
I was maybe worried about that. Anyway, I got my
wisdom teeth taken out. I probably was on day three
or day four of recovery, so my cheeks and jaw
(10:26):
were still pretty swollen. But I took my pain medication
and I put on my best blazer and suit that
I had at the time and went and did the interview.
And I can't remember, y'all if the interview was in
two parts. I feel like maybe it was. I feel
(10:46):
like I had an initial interview with someone, and then
when I came back for the second interview, Oh no,
I remember. I think the first interview was just with
someone generally from HR, and of course I'm having to
explain to them that my face doesn't normally look like
this and that my voice doesn't normally sound this way
(11:08):
because I just had my wisdom teeth taken out. And
I think a week or so later, maybe I came
back for the second round of interviews, which was actually
with the person that was over the department I would
have been going into, and another manager from that department,
and y'all. The main thing that I remember about the
(11:30):
second round of interviews for this corporate job is the
manager of the department I was working in, which was
considered in this company employee communications. So we were basically
like I'm sure in some companies we probably would be
like where HR Communications was, because we were the department
(11:51):
that would have been writing anything could have been memos
to safety manuals. But also the company had its own
uh employee magazine and employee website, and so sometimes we
would get to write like human interest stories for things
like that. So when I get to this second round
(12:11):
of the interview, you know, they ask you all the
all the typical things you get asked in an interview
about your strengths and your weaknesses and times you had
to show leadership, and times you had to address conflict,
you know, and you try to like pull some answer
out of there about something that happened at summer camp, right,
And I remember the last question of the interview, my
(12:34):
what would have been my boss's boss's boss's boss asks me,
what makes you different than all of the other applicants
that we've seen, what should make us want to hire you?
And I drew a blank. I could not honestly think
of what to say, and I just said the first
thing that came to my mind. I said, I'm a
(12:57):
joy to work with. And they both laughed like big
laughs in the office, and then after they laughed and
I laughed a little bit too, but I was like, yeah,
I guess it is kind of funny, but like for real,
(13:18):
like really like I feel like anybody that works with
me would say they had a good time working with me.
So that was my calling card that they never forgot that.
That was my answer to the question. Bless my heart
today anyway, So I start this job. I think I
(13:40):
actually came back for a third time. And when I
came back to the office for the third time was
when I received the offer. And this is the only time,
because this is the only corporate job that I ever worked,
but this is the only time that I had that
moment where they had typed up the offer and it
was the folder and they like slid it across the table.
(14:03):
I mean, if I if I knew then what I
know now, I probably would have negotiated a little more.
But when I opened up that folder and saw the money,
I was like, I'm rich, I'm rich. This is wow, wow, wow,
all of that is going to be just for me. Wow.
(14:25):
It didn't even occur to me to push them back
and asked them for five thousand more, ten thousand more.
It's not none of that occurred to me. I just
looked at the money and I was like, oh my gosh.
And I think they had they had some element of
calculating what all of the benefits were worth as well.
And this was a large, very established, fortunate companies, so
(14:49):
they had a lot of like legacy type of benefits.
I mean, they had the four oh one K with
the up to three percent match, and they had the insurance.
They had like a mental health line that you could
call and get access to any mental health resources that
you needed. Like they had financial advising. I mean, it
was all the benefits everything. So I started working this job.
(15:16):
There were three other women also hired in my same position.
We were all hired into like an entry level We
were considered communications specialists, which meant we were entry level
writers coming into the company. One of the women of
the four of us, she was like legacy to the
company because she had been working for the company for
(15:37):
a while and been promoted from within, and then the
other three of us were coming in from the outside,
and y'all, I felt so professional. I mean, this was
like an old guard kind of company. So they wanted
you to be dressed in a blazer if you left
your cubicle. I think at the time that I was hired,
(15:58):
which was two thoul was in five. Women were not
allowed to dress bare legged at work. You had to
wear pantyhose, you had to wear close toe shoes. So
there were certain parts of it that I was excited
about because it just felt so grown up. I remember
(16:19):
going to the outlet mall with one of my girlfriends
to get my first, you know, a couple of suits,
so like that part felt very grown up. But the
whole pantyhose and the closed toe shoes. That was that
was wild because that was just starting to get really
uncomfortable really fast. And they were very like formal rules
about wearing your blazer. Like you weren't supposed to leave
(16:41):
your cubicle without wearing your blazer, but then if you
were sitting at your cubicle, you were allowed to wear
your blazer. At the time I was hired, the company
was actually resistant to you listening to music with headphones
at your desk. I'm sure some of you are listening.
Some of you that work in corporate are listening to
me right now, like this is wild. These were wild times, people,
(17:04):
and this was a company that probably was ten to
twenty years behind what a lot of companies had come
to with casual fridays and allowing people to dress more casually.
So for the first six months or so, I can't
say it was my dream job, but I was very
happy to be getting paid to write. That was getting
(17:25):
paid pretty well. I was able to afford an apartment
of my own, you know, I was just fully paying
for all of my things. Any concert that I wanted
to go to, I could go to it. You know,
I was all ready for that. I was very excited
about it. I think as time went on, I got
about six months in before I realized I hated that job.
(17:49):
And there's a couple of signs that happened to you
when you hate your job. I started to get like
a burning sensation in my stomach. Sunday nights, like Sunday
nights would come and I was just like, oh gosh,
I would have to give myself a talk about why
I'm going to go to this job. I remember, um
Kanye West's album Graduation came out while I was working
(18:12):
in that job, and I I had to like find
some music to listen to on my way to work
to motivate me to remember why I'm here trying to
do this job, and I hope it helps my career.
It was just slowly losing its allure because I don't
(18:34):
know what I expected when they said they were hiring writers.
I think I was hoping for something that was going
to feel, you know, like a little bit of journalism
and have sould to it. But this was a company
that was their business was very centered in supply chain,
you know, So it wasn't like I was working for
a company that was very centered on creativity. They were
(18:56):
centered on engineering and logistics and technology. They were not
centered on you writing flowery things for anything. So it
turned out that a lot of what I thought was
going to be some creative writing that could challenge me,
some journalistic writing, a lot of it was actually taking
(19:17):
things that other people had written ten or twenty years
before and just adding little tweaks and updates to it.
That was basically my job. And I was bored to
death and feeling very disillusioned about the whole thing. The
other thing that was happening that made me go, you
don't need to maybe work here anymore. So I remember
one of my managers he pulled me into his cubicle
(19:41):
and he was like, please sit down, and so I
sit down and he's like, why do you ask so
many questions? Anybody who knows me very well knows that
I have questions about just about everything, but in particular
with writing, because I'm always like, well, why are we
writing this? And who are we writing this too? And
(20:02):
why are we being asked to write it this way?
I remember asking him one time, is this propaganda that
you're asking me to write? And he said to me, Amina,
stop asking so many questions and just right, just don't
think about it so much and just finish the task
at hand. And I walked back to my cubicle and
(20:24):
realized I didn't know how to do that as a writer,
and didn't want to know how to do that. I
didn't want to know how to separate my soul from writing.
And that was when I realized that I needed to
come up with an exit plan. Here's something else interesting
that happened when I was at that job that really
(20:45):
really informed a lot of my choice to quit. So
there was a black woman manager in our department, and
she was very much like a workaholic type personality. She
was one of those people that like when she was
at work, she gets the job done, but also like,
you know, if you email her something Saturday morning, she's
(21:06):
going to email you back, like she was on her
job like that. And then she got pregnant. Remember she
got pregnant. Remember she had her baby, And I remember
when she came back to work, she was totally different.
She had changed, and people were expecting her to be
(21:29):
available to them all the time. They were expecting her
to work fifty and sixty hours, you know a week.
They were expecting her to make herself accessible to them
all the time like she had before, and she just
didn't want to because she had gotten married and had
this baby and she wanted to be with her family more.
(21:54):
And I wasn't close to her, and I never talked
to her about it. I just remember watching her, you know,
I mean now thinking about it. She was probably in
her mid thirties to maybe early forties, and I'm watching
her and watching her negotiate things like those of you
that work in corporate are familiar with f m l A,
(22:15):
which is the Family Medical Leaf Act, And when you
work in corporate, at least at that time, things may
be different now, But when you worked in corporate then
you had a limited amount of time that you could
take off, you know, in the case that you had
a baby or had other reasons to need to take
fm l A. And watching her need the time to
(22:36):
really take off, but watching her worry about her job
security and probably coming back sooner than she wished. She
had to write. And so I'm observing all of this,
and I made this internal promised to myself there in
my mid twenties, and I promised myself that you know,
(22:57):
here I was, I wasn't married, I'm not even sure
I was dating anyone at this point. Um I didn't
have any children, and I promised myself that by the
time I was thirty, I wanted to be writing and
doing my art full time. And a part of my
reason for doing that was because if I were to
(23:18):
get married and decide to have children, I wanted to
have freedom. I didn't want my corporate job to be
able to tell me, you know, what I had to do.
And that was when it really started churning in me,
like you're gonna have to leave this job. You gotta
figure out how you're going to do that. So I
(23:39):
worked the job almost two years, and in the meantime,
I'm using all my vacation days to take gigs out
of town. And there were times that requests would come
in for me to perform at different events and I
had to say no because it was a Wednesday in
the middle of the week and it would be too
awkward for this if I had going on at work
(24:01):
for me to take that gig out of town in
the middle of the week. Of course, to me, it
felt like there were just tons of gigs I had
to say no to. It probably was not tons. It
was probably five or less. But all of those times
that I had to say no because I was working
this job I didn't like. It just burned me up.
So every year around Christmas, we would get a Christmas
(24:24):
or holiday bonus, and the holiday bonus was basically like
a third paycheck. So you were already getting your two
paychecks a year. Every year that I worked there, I
got a little bit of a raise, and then you
were getting this third check. And I don't know why.
Maybe by this time I had just become so dissatisfied
(24:47):
with the job, and I felt like I was missing
out on all these opportunities to really do what I
wanted to do for a living. I just decided, when
I get this Christmas bonus whenever hits my account, as
soon as it clears in my account, I'm going to
put in my two week notice. And I did put
in my two week notice. Feedback about that decision from
(25:10):
my coworkers was very mixed. Some of my coworkers were like,
I know, you'll make it, You'll do great, you know.
Some of them were a little bit familiar with some
of the other things I was doing, like outside of work,
performing and stuff. Some of them were like, I wish
I could do what you're doing, but I just stay
in this job, you know, for the benefits for my family,
(25:32):
or for my health or what have you. And some people,
honestly were just like, this is the dumbest thing you
can do. And they were just like, you finally got
a job with a company that basically doesn't fire anyone. Incorporate,
they don't fire anyone, you know. They were like, now,
can't say what the other parts of the workforce experienced there,
(25:53):
but in corporate it was very rare that they ever
did furloughs or layoffs, you know. So they were like,
you basically got a job that you could keep until
you retire. Why would you leave here on some fleeting
dream of being a writer. And of course, as I
say it out loud, it does sound fleeting, But to
my then twenty seven year old self, it didn't sound
(26:17):
fleeting at all. So I quit. I still remember waking
up with anxiety that January, realizing that I was working
for myself and I didn't have a boss, and I
just kept waking up with anxiety because there wasn't anyone
to tell me what to do every day. I also
(26:39):
was like waiting for all the requests to come in.
You know, I was like, where are all the emails? Hey, everybody,
I'm available. Well, let's have a little less than in economics,
shall we. Because I quit my job December of two
thousand seven, and what happened in two thousand eight the
market tanked everyone, Guests who didn't study economics, Guests who
(27:04):
didn't even know the market was tanking at the time. Okay,
So all that to say, mainly the arena that I
was working in at that time. I was performing in
predominantly Christian, white conservative settings. Okay. So these were mostly,
(27:26):
if not all, nonprofit organizations that I was working with,
So their budgets got hit too. They don't have the
extra money to be paying for a poet to be
coming to talk about anything. So I had no invitations
to speak, no gigs, very little money. And then I
fell in love. And no, y'all, not with my husband.
(27:49):
I fell in love with this other man. All of
this story I'm telling y'all is before I met my husband. Okay,
So I fell in love with this man. And now
that I think about the timing of this, I fell
(28:12):
in love with this man that was kind of like
I can only describe our friendship as it was sort
of like a flirty friendship that the two of us had.
We you know, we're both performing artists. He was a
lot more established in his career than me, but you know,
we had met out like in the performing artist scene
in Atlanta, try dating. Decided to just let that be friends.
(28:37):
But even though we had said the words out loud,
let's be friends, it really wasn't like that. When we
would see each other, even though we both dated other
people with see each other all the time, there was
just this like electricity still there. So I think maybe
because I had more free time. Now I know that
wasn't really free time. That was actually time that I
(28:58):
should have been building my busin this but you know,
you live, you learn. Because I had more free time
and because I had a big crush on him, we
started hanging out more. And then we're like, Okay, you're single,
I'm single. We've always been toyed around with this idea,
let's date. So we date, and look, I'm head over
heels in love with the man. If he says he
(29:19):
want to watch Netflix and hang out all day, sure,
If he wants to go bowling, great, If he wants
to catch a movie in the middle of the week,
in the middle of the day. I'm saying yes to that.
He can do some of these things because he's more
established than I am. He's making more money than I
am at the time. So when he's like, hey, let's
go chill, let's after he's done, you know, a big
(29:41):
project for a client and he's getting paid, I'm going
months and months and months no pay. Right, Well, we
try the dating thing and after a few months discover
this isn't working. More so that he discovered, let's be honest,
more so that he discovered it wasn't wor working for him,
and I just had to be like, yeah, okay, yeah,
(30:03):
well I have to accept that thing. So right at
the time that he and I are going through the
breakup time, and when I say he and I really
mean me because I don't know that he was like
struggling or suffering in any way after that breakup. I
was quite heartbroken over it at the time. And right
(30:24):
around the time that we go through this, like we're
not gonna be dating each other, and I'm just like
in my you know, destitute breakup time. You know, any
of you that have been through that type of destitute breakup.
It's like you're wearing the sweats, you don't remember the
last time you shower. You're just like eating food and
crying a little bit, probably crying a lot. That's what
(30:45):
it was like around this time. I'm also realizing that
I'm going broke because I didn't really have any savings
going into this decision to quit my corporate job. I
didn't really have the savings. All I had was that
extra check, and that wasn't going to carry me very far.
(31:06):
So I'm going broke. There are bills that are do
that I'm not able to pay them. I'm living in
an apartment I can no longer afford. My car gets repossessed.
I have to borrow money from family members and friends
to get my car out of repossession. I have to
move out of my cute little one bedroom apartment. Those
(31:28):
of you that live in Atlanta, I had a cute
one bedroom apartment in Vinings. It is just the cutest
little neighborhood. I mean, I had to give up that
little apartment get that car back out of repossession. A
friend of a friend opened up her home to me.
I moved in with her and rented out a bedroom
and a bathroom from her, and I think, I think
(31:53):
in that moment, I'm feeling like a failure, honestly, because
I think it had not even been a year. I'm
trying to think, had it even been a year. Maybe
it had been a year, maybe a little over a year,
(32:14):
And there I was just broke and struggling. And that
was not in the script that I had developed for
myself that when you are watching the movie about the
girl who quits her corporate job, I mean, she has
a few scenes where she cries and things don't go well,
but then like something really amazing happens to her and
(32:37):
then everything works out fine. And I was not experiencing
the works out fine. I felt like a failure. I
felt embarrassed that I had seemed so confident in my
choice to quit my job. So I felt a lot
of feelings about that time and feeling like a big failure,
(32:59):
and also so feeling like I didn't know how to
talk to God. And for me not only having grown
up in a Christian context, but I grew up in
like a charismatic Pentecostal Christian context, it was very much like,
(33:19):
you know, we have faith we believe these things like
these things happen, and so I think even believing that
way in the context of where like my Christian faith
was at the time, made accepting this moment very hard
because I not only felt like a failure, but then
I was questioning like, did I cause this? Did God
(33:41):
air quote speak to me and tell me to do this?
Was it the right thing? Was the wrong thing? And
I remember going through a long period of time after
I had moved out of my apartment and moved in
with my then housemate, and on top of that, I
had started working a customers urfast job because I was
I was broke in order for me to pay rent
(34:03):
to her, you know, I was gonna have to work somewhere,
and the gigs had dried up to the point that
I didn't even know if I would ever have more
of a career doing spoken word. So I found out
that this company was hiring customer service associates, and it
was like a big kind of like cattle call thing,
(34:24):
and all of us that were broke, we win and
you filled out all this stuff and then you had
so many weeks of training, but they really didn't have
a lot of choice time frames for the training. So
the one that they had mostly available was four pm
to one am in the morning, and so I did
(34:45):
my training. I think the training was six weeks and
it was paid training, so there were there were a
lot of people who were not intending to stay at
that job, but they were intending to finish. There's six
weeks training and get paid and then like move on
and do something else. I remember my birthday that year.
I was so broke, and everyone else and my training
(35:08):
class was so broke that when my birthday came, I
had to work on my birthday and they bought the
hostess cupcakes from the vending machine and put coffee stirs
inside of the cupcakes and saying happy birthday to me,
and I blew onto the coffee stirs as if they
(35:28):
had candles, right, And working in that job was humbling
one because again, you know, I'm dealing with just feeling
like I failed at trying to do my artist's career
and and being back to working, especially after having worked
a corporate job which paid well and had all the
(35:48):
good benefits and now being back to you know, working
a much lower amount per hour, not having any benefits
at all. Basically It's like, the amount of time you
show up here is the amount of time that you're
gonna get paid for, and when you don't show up,
you don't get paid. There were no vacation days, there
was no four oh one k there was none of
that stuff. And working that job really, in a way,
(36:13):
I think it gave me the time to myself to
really process what was happening. It was also hard for
me because I had a very you know, nice social
life at the time, and once I started working in
that corporate job, I was missing everything. Everyone's birthday parties
and all the cool shows we would have gone to.
I really just was going to work and coming home
(36:36):
and the time that I had as free time, all
the rest of my friends were at work, And in
a way, me having that time alone number one, I
think it helped me to give myself time to process
all that had happened. The stress of the breakup, the
going broke, the you know, having to ask my family
members for money. I'm an oldest kid, I'm I'm very
(36:58):
like I would rather shoulder it all on my shoulders
than have to ask, you know, my parents for money.
So I had to be in dire straight to do that,
and it was very humbling to go to them and
ask them, and I finally had after like three months
of working the job. I finished the training. And then
(37:19):
after you finished training, there were certain positions available on
the floor, but most of the positions that were available
were at the least desirable time at night. So I
stayed on the four pm to one am shift and
just worked there once I finished my training, And I
think after working that job, when I hit that three
(37:40):
four month time frame, I started to realize that I
needed to surrender. And surrender is a word I really
hate for various reasons. Is not a word I love.
In in the context of my Christian faith, Surrendering means
(38:02):
you are saying to God that you trust God with
your life. And I hate that. I just I just
hate it, y'all. I hate it because you're asking me
to trust my life to someone that I can't see,
(38:24):
and to trust my life to someone whose decisions I
question sometimes. But in my relationship to God, feeling like
I do trust that God knows better than I do,
so I do want to surrender to God these expectations,
(38:47):
these things. But I think also inherent in the word
surrender is letting go of what our expectations may have been.
And I thought I was going to be like a
shooting star after quitting my corporate job. I thought all
these amazing opportunities were just going to fall at my feet.
I thought I wasn't going to have to work that hard, honestly,
(39:08):
And so the other element of surrendering that I had
to do was sort of letting go of those expectations.
And just that was my first time in a long
time just sort of opening my hands to life and saying,
you know, hey, this is what I thought I was
supposed to do. I thought I was supposed to perform poetry.
I thought I was supposed to be a writer. Maybe
that's not it. Maybe there's something else for me. But
(39:31):
whatever it is, you know, I was just saying, in
my own prayer, out of my soul to God, whatever
it is that you have planned for my life, you
know I want to do that more than I want
to meet up to some expectations I made up somewhere.
And I'll tell you what's interesting. When you get to
(39:51):
a place, it's it's kind of weird, y'all, Because I
get really leery of people being like and as soon
as I prayed that prayer, here comes this opportunity, or
as soon as I, you know, surrender this thing, here
comes this You know. I really don't think life is
that clean cut of an equation. I think there will
(40:14):
be plenty of times that you may pray the prayer,
you may surrender the thing, and you may still have
to go on and not see this like huge, big change.
But at the same time, and this is what was
true for me in this moment. I think also when
we come upon a sense of openness inside of ourselves
(40:38):
and we become open to the fluidity of life, we
become open to the fact that our happiness doesn't have
to look one way, or our approach to our vocation
doesn't have to look one way. I think that does,
in this very spiritual sense, open us up to the
(41:00):
possibilities of life. And I do think there is this,
you know, energy out in the world that like when
you do that act of surrendering, whether that you know,
looks like it did for me and my Christian faith,
or whatever that looks like for you in however you
practice spirituality, like I do think there's something powerful about
(41:23):
the act of being open handed about one's life that
can open you up to the opportunities to come. I
don't think it means you know this plus this equals this,
you know, but I do think it opens you up
to that. And so after I had that moment, I'm
still like working my job. Get to the point that
I worked there long enough to choose a different shift
(41:44):
so I was able to work during the day, and
I start getting some calls like out of the blue
to you know, perform at a college here or there,
perform at a church here or there. And I'm just
taking in, you know, the gigs as they come. I've
been I've been doing nothing but working. So I was
paying down my debts and building up my savings and
(42:04):
sort of taking the money that I was making whenever
I did get a gig and just acting like I
didn't get it, just banking it and putting it in
savings and only living off of the money that I
was making at my job. And I get this call
to do this particular event. They were having a tenure
anniversary and their theme for the event was on your Mark.
(42:28):
And I remember being on the conference call as they're
like telling me, you know, the different things about the
theme and They're like, oh, we'd love for you to
write accustomed poem to open our event. And I was
listening and almost started to cry on the call because
as they were talking about the theme, and you know,
what do we do and we feel like we've missed
(42:49):
the mark. I mean, I just felt like they knew
my life somehow, you know. And I remember working on
that poem and writing that poem from such a tender
place because I actually really did feel those feelings and
putting my own questions and my own uncertainties and doubts
(43:09):
into the piece. And I remember when I went to
do the sound check, I didn't realize how big of
an event it was. So at that time, the event
was in this arena in Atlanta, and the arena could
see like twelve thousand people. And I'm one of those
people that sometimes when big opportunities come to me, I
(43:30):
sort of like psyched myself out and I'm like, it's
doesn't have to be that big of a deal. It's
not that big of a deal. Like I do that
to myself all the time, And so I started giving
myself that story. Like when I walked into the arena,
I was like, oh, then I was like, it's okay,
you're you know, you're just opening the event. You know,
there's lots of people are going to speak and perform.
It's not it's not that big of a deal. It
(43:50):
was totally that big of a deal, y'all. Okay. So
I came back the next day perform this piece that
I had written at the opening. Remember, I came out
into the lobby of the arena because I was actually
looking for a friend of mine that I was trying
to meet up with, and all these people like walk
up to me, they're they're giving me their business cards. I,
(44:11):
for the record, have no business cards. Um, I have
no CDs that I can remember to sell. At that point,
I'm just there with like, y'all. To be utterly honest,
I had a little many legal pad where the pages
looked like clouds. Okay, that is all. I had that
(44:34):
in a wallet to my name. That's it. All these
people came up wanting to write down their information in
my notebook, stuffing their business cards into my notebook. And
I went home that week and from that event, I
got so many invitations to speak that there wasn't gonna
be a way to take them all. And still work
my job. I've been working, and I had been saving
(44:56):
money for the times that inevitably come where you don't
have gigs come in, and so I quit my job
again January of I think would have been two thousand ten. Yeah,
I quit my job again January of two thousand and ten.
(45:18):
But this time, I feel like I quit my job
much better. I was more prepared for the ups and
downs of what it really means to be a full
time artist. I've saved up money, I had decreased my
debt I was I was really living on less, you know.
I had decreased my expenses as well. So I went
(45:39):
into the second time quitting with a much more business mind.
So that time I quit my job for good. I've
never had to again pick up a job like a
forty hour a week job. I've been full time as
a performing artist as a writer since then. Here are
(46:01):
my takeaways I wanted to share with you because prior
to the pandemic, I would get questions all the time
when I would travel and people would be like, Oh,
I hate my job. I really want to be doing this,
and they would like fill in the blank with whatever
their dream was. I really want to be doing that
and I'm just so tired of my job and think
I think I'm just going to quit and just start
And I would be like, no, no, no, don't, don't
(46:24):
quit your day job yet. And I know the stakes
are different now. You know. Even for a lot of
my friends that had been doing very well, you know,
speaking performing doing things that require you to be in
front of an audience, you know, all of us experienced
this big shift in trying to think about, Okay, well
(46:46):
what does that look like? Now? You know what does
all of that mean? But even in the midst of
a pandemic, even in the midst of really hard times,
it doesn't mean that we cease to have dreams or
see us to have things that were passionate about. So
I want to tell you if you are currently working
a job where you are you know, feeling that like
(47:10):
you know, in your stomach on Sunday nights before starting
work on Monday, where you are having to give yourself
a big pep talk before you get on any of
these zoom meetings, I want you to not quit your
day job just yet. Before you quit save money. That's
one piece of advice I would have gone back to
(47:32):
give myself when I worked corporate, I was really making
more money than I knew what to do with. And
if I could do anything all over, I would go
back and just save money, you know, not just blow
through it. Save the money, stack the money. If you
are going to do anything that's a dream of yours
as a vocation, you will inevitably go through times that
(47:55):
will be more lean, where you won't have as much
money coming in. Even the success stories that you read
about are very rarely just this linear experience where they
just start from nothing and whoop, everything goes well. That's
actually very rare that that happens. A lot of it
is not very linear. It's a lot of starts and stops.
(48:15):
It's a lot of feast and famine. You're going to
experience both sides of that. So save money, get out
of debt as much as you can. Use the job
that you're working that you may hate right now, use
it to help you fuel your dreams. Some of us
are going to be privileged enough that we have you know,
family members or parents that can give us that seed
(48:37):
money to get started, or have an inheritance we can
lean on. But most of us won't have that. Most
of us will be our own inheritance. Really we we
will be the ones that will put together that initial
you know, seed money for ourselves. So do those things,
also write a business plan. Dreams can be very emotional,
(48:58):
and that also means that sometimes our ego and our
value and worthiness can get all tied up in our
dreams and if we achieve our dreams and wanting people
to applaud us in different things. But dreams are not
just emotional things. If you want your dream to actually
(49:18):
become a reality, you need a plan, and I think
a basic business plan is a great place to start.
There are tons of great business planning books. But I
also like to say, you know, you don't have to
start just like spending money to get your business started.
There are so many great resources, even online that won't
(49:40):
cost you anything. There's the library where you can go
and check out some of those books. But at least
get yourself a basic template for a business plan and
fill it out. Even if you're a performing artist, even
if you're like but I make pottery, yeah, fill out
the business plan. You're a dancer, you're a choreographer, yes,
fill out your business plan. You do visual art, yep,
(50:02):
you fill out a business plan. I know, especially for
those of us that are doing creative work, business plans
can feel corporate and can feel like non intuitive to us.
But even those of us that are arts connoisseurs and
our creatives and make art as well, there will still
(50:24):
be business involved. If you intend for this to be
what is helping you make a living, there will still
be contracts to sign, and you'll have to decide on
what your rates are and if those rates are really
equal to the time that it actually takes you to
make what you're making. So becoming a full time artists
(50:45):
or whatever your dream is to do full time it
also means becoming a business person. And I think if
you're prepared for that, um, then you're better better off
and better suited to actually survive it in the long run.
And I also want to speak to this, being a
full time artist isn't everything. And that's not me being
(51:11):
self deprecating. It's not me doing the thing where sometimes
when someone is, you know, doing well in a particular
area of their life, then they start to sort of
downplay it and be like, well, let me tell you
all the things that are actually really bad about it.
That's not me saying that what I mean is whatever
(51:33):
your dream is, it doesn't have to be your vocation.
And I think sometimes we make a pedestal of our
dream becoming our job, and it doesn't always have to
be that way. I love what I do. I've been
full time doing this. Oh my gosh, it will be
(51:54):
eleven years this year, and I had to remind myself
end of last year and into this year that part
of the reason why I wanted to become a full
time artist was for freedom. And the day that this
is no longer freedom to me, then it's okay. If
(52:14):
I decide I want to go back and work for
someone else, it's okay. If I decide I want to
go back into corporate America or wherever I find myself going.
You know, I've learned over this journey to not put
pressure on how a thing has to look. That it's
most important that the core part of what I'm doing
(52:35):
and why I'm doing it are still there. And truth
be told, there are so many people who honestly are
never going to do their dream full time, and they
make a conscious choice. Sometimes sometimes it's what they have
to do for survival. They have to work that job.
So that it can pay their bills, so they can
(52:57):
take care of their family members or whatever. So it
doesn't mean that a person with a dream is a
failure because they don't do that dream as their job.
And I wish I heard more people saying that honestly,
because I feel like society can put society and capitalism,
(53:18):
to be honest, can put this pressure on you that
everything you dream, it's not real. You're not dedicated to
it if it's not what you do for your job.
And there are plenty of people who are doing their
dream for their job and they're burnt out and it's
affecting their health because they wish that maybe they were
working somewhere else and doing their dream on the side.
(53:40):
I think what's most important is that you find something
that you love and do that as often as you can.
And for some people that's gonna be once a year.
You know, there's gonna be some people that get an
opportunity to just right once a year, and for some
people it's a few times a year. And for some people,
(54:00):
you know, they'll do what they love every week and
work this job that isn't really their jam, but it's
the job that fuels their ability to do their dream.
So don't let anybody put pressure on you either way.
Don't let anybody put pressure on you that your dream
has to be your job. And if you're working your
dream job and it's no longer your dream anymore, you're
(54:25):
not a failure for changing. You're not a failure for
deciding to do different things. Find something you love, and
do it some of the time as much of the
time as you can. Anyway. I hope you all enjoyed
this edition of that time. I I hope you think
(54:45):
about whatever your dream is. I know we're in a pandemic,
and I know some of our dreams probably feel even
further away than they did before, But it doesn't mean
that that has to be the end of the story
of your dream. Give up on your dream, and don't
put pressure on yourself for your dream to look one
particular way. If there's anything, I hope you walk away
(55:08):
from our story time together, I hope you walk away
thinking about how you can approach your life more open handed,
how you can find a rhythm of surrender, whether that
is in your relationship with God, if that's what you believe,
or whether it's in your relationship to yourself. Thank you
(55:32):
all so much for just you know, coming into the
living room and taking off your shoes, bringing your snacks,
hanging out with me while we have a little story time.
And I hope as I'm sharing my story that maybe
it reminds you of some of your own story too.
I hope it sparks some conversation with you, maybe among
your friends or your co workers at that job you hate.
(55:56):
Isn't it funny that you can have a job you
hate and still of the people you work with. And
I guess you can also have a job you love
and not really enjoy the people you work with. So
you gotta find some enjoyment wherever you can. Okay, Hey,
if you have more questions or other things that came
to your mind that you want to know about what
it's like to see dreams become reality, I would love
(56:19):
to address them here on the podcast. So I am
inviting you to slide into my d MS, not with
any of that you know stuff where those men will
be on there trying to be your sugar daddy. Don't
slide into my d MS with that, but slide into
my d MS if you have any questions or feedback
about this. You can follow me and my d M
(56:39):
s at Amina b e E on Instagram and Twitter.
I would love to engage with you there get some
feedback from you here If there are any follow up
questions I can address in another episode. For this week's
edition of Give Her a Crown, I want to give
a crown to my mom, Jean Brown. My mom raised
(57:00):
to my sister and me as a single mom, and
now that I'm a grown woman, I know it was
harder for her than I could have known it was
as a child. My mom has survived so many things,
and she raised my sister and I to be free
thinking women. And my mom worked her dream job. She
wanted to be a nurse ever since she was a
(57:20):
little girl, so she became one. She was actually finishing
nursing school with me in her belly, and despite the
racism that she encountered that tried to keep her from succeeding,
she became a neo natal nurse and is still in
her nursing career. She never put pressure on me to
get married or to have kids. She only encouraged me
(57:42):
to achieve my dreams and to get an education. If
it weren't for her, I wouldn't be here talking to
y'all today. To my mom Jean Brown, give her a crown.
That time I met India are Ye. That time I
went on a really bad date. That time I was
(58:07):
directed by Robert Townsend. That time I got Mono on Thanksgiving.
That time I went on a really bad Christmas tour.
That time I'm I Heard with Amina Brown is produced
by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part
of the Seneca Women Podcast Network and partnership with I
(58:29):
Heart Radio. Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe, rate,
and review the podcast.
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