Who stole my 20’s?

Earlier this month, I started the last year of my twenties. Except for the occasional conversation with Gabby about how we should celebrate my 30th in Vegas, I’m not handling the whole getting older phenomenon too well.

I am now obsessing over different aspects of my life, like my career, relationship and financial situation, and starting to wonder where the hell my twenties went. Some days, I feel like I’m happy and right where I should be, and others, I want to cry for hours over the fact that I’m going to be 30 in less than a year and don’t have a whole lot to show for it.

Take my career for example. As I mentioned before, I majored in political science. I chose this major because I was going to be a foreign ambassador and speak several different languages fluently. Well, those language classes took up a ton of time, and the credits didn’t go towards fulfilling requirements, so I stopped taking them. Then my attention switched to law school, and I decided that I was going to be the next great prosecutor and put all the bad guys away. A personal situation involving the criminal justice system was enough to make me run away screaming from that potential career path – and to never look back.

Then, my senior year, I took a political communications class and fell in love with it. It combined my interests in government, politics and the law with my natural ability to communicate. I wanted to be a political consultant and work on campaigns, write speeches, deal with the press and all of that other fun stuff.

When I graduated, I decided to stay in Pittsburgh – and since there really aren’t too many political consulting jobs here – let alone entry level ones that paid, I had to figure something out and fast. I had always been good at marketing and PR and had done a lot of volunteer work in those fields. So, I thought I would pursue “communications” as a job to get experience in that part of political consulting.

I spent a year and a half in a horrible job as a marketing assistant for an insurance brokerage firm. It was straight out of Office Space. They didn’t have a lot of marketing needs. I was constantly bored and made things up to do, and the older women in the office treated me like garbage.

My next job was perfect – on paper. I did marketing communications and online business development for a large media company. I got a ton of really great experience, met smart and respected people in the field and built up a pretty decent portfolio. I left after three years for two main reasons: my boss was a narcissistic, micromanaging, menopausal bitch and the industry’s stability was constantly in question – therefore my salary and benefits weren’t great.

Next up – my current job is in online marketing and public relations at a very well known institution. It’s been great on several levels. I can take graduate classes for free at a prestigious university. My hours are flexible. I get paid competitively. But, I’m doing marketing and pr for an organization that, for the most part, doesn’t want publicity or exposure. And the few programs that do want and desperately need marketing, have no money to pay for it. I’m good, but I’m not so good that I can magically and for free accomplish what a $50,000 (or more) campaign could do.

This whole debacle got me thinking about marketing, pr, advertising, etc as a whole. Is this really what I want to spend the rest of my life doing? Spinning products or news to make something look good or stand out? The answer is no. Unless it was for something that I really, truly believed in.

So what do I want to do with my career? I spent my twenties saying, “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.” That seemed to work. It was true, and in the marketing field, there are a lot of different options of what you “can be.”

But now it kind of feels like I should have it narrowed down to more of a path or two. I’m just not entirely sure what those paths should be. I like to write. I think I’d like to teach college courses. But write what? Teach what? I have the opportunity to get my Master’s FOR FREE – but I don’t know what I want to get it in…I don’t think I want to pigeonhole myself into this marketing field too much more. I’m interested in other things like history and public policy, but marketing is where my experience is.

I’m panicking about this now because I’m completely afraid of waking up one day and being 40 or 50 and not happy with the career – and life – path I chose.