Who You Are and What You Do

It's something I think about a lot, especially as I progress in years, not as though I'm terribly aged yet at 28 years-old.  The title, that is, I think about Who I am and how it does and doesn't relate to What I do.  I've touched on this a little from the question of "Where do you see yourself in (x) years?" in a vlog post, but clearly I still find myself pondering it into the hours of the night(it's just after 4am).

What your job is by description and how you work can be two entirely different things, and various types of work or jobs seem to be viewed by some as almost in differing classes(think of blue collar and white collar as existing terms).  There is a lot of work to be done, and it's not like everybody wants the crummy jobs.  Taking pride in yourself and how you work is important to me, not so much as what you do.  Then again, let's also try to remember that it can be a great boon for someone to work in a field that they enjoy and are passionate about.

So it's good to try to do what you love, what you are good at, though at the same time, how you work and who you are can be more important than your station.

I think about it because I want to be able to do the things I love and am passionate about, but I also need to make a living.  It becomes a matter of wanting to do both, and the best route would seem to be to make a living by doing what I love to do.

That made me start asking myself the question of what I love to do, what I am passionate about.  I enjoy a lot of things, and learning has always been something I've enjoyed, which only contributed to making it less obvious of an answer.  I thought about what I do when it's my choice, when I have free time.

I love to design worlds, characters, settings, and story concepts.  The amount of information and work I have created and put into even just the Future d10: Visceroth Cluster pen-and-paper rpg system and setting is pretty massive.  There are characters who exist in doodles, sketches, notes, and my imagination, who will likely never be known by hardly anyone else.  I love these characters, I've spent hours and hours of my life dreaming them up, drawing them, creating tales around them.

I don't know that I would write my stories, so I haven't pursued the path of a writer.  I'd like to make these RPG systems into a thing, so trying to get those to a publishable state would be a great goal, though it seems lofty.  I'd love to try to make a graphic novel for the Echoes story, and dabble in it, but my art is still a WIP.  Even then, how do I go about making a living doing that or while I do that?(rhetorical, that's the conversation)  To thrive at something, it's best to be able to invest as much as you can to help ensure success(assuming what you invest does indeed help).

Mostly, I have thoughts and ideas that I just want to share, and while that doesn't make me a living, I can do it for free.  All I ever think about these days is how much I wish I was doing these things, but I haven't been lately.  I've been doing my job and it's been wearing down on me.  There are a lot of people who worked hard for years in their free time to eventually be able to do what they love, so I can't use that as an excuse.  

So I feel like the best I can do is keep trying to get myself to work on the things that I love like they are my job, so that one day, maybe they can be.