Merlin Mann had a great point about blogs, and I paraphrase here: The first several posts are always the same. Welcome, I chose some fonts, who I am, etc. His idea was to start at the fifth post. Dive in with what you have to say.
So here we go.
Who –>
I am one of the many people who found themselves out of a job when COVID-19 hit, and maybe out of a career. It’s been a good one, but my industry, it ain’t coming back any time soon. I work in theater. Perhaps worked in theater is more accurate.
Theater will be one of the last things to come back, and we don’t know what it is going to look like, and who will have survived. Arts organizations have been on shoestrings for a long time. Many are not going to survive being shutdown for long, and opening at reduced capacity doesn’t pay the bills.
My end of the business is in the technical side of things. I was an Audio Engineer. I toured with Broadway shows, did small and large productions, and was head of audio at an opera house in my last job. I was in a very secure position in an industry not known for it, and it ended in the blink of an eye.
Now what?
The question is simple: what do I do now? I can sit and wait – wait for my industry to heal itself enough to go back to work in it, wait for my old job to come back.
I don’t think that is going to happen any time soon. If the theater industry mounts a comeback before the beginning of 2021 (over 5 months away as I write this), I will be surprised. If it’s healthy enough to go back to work at the levels it was at, I will be flabbergasted.
Or I can work with the assumption that my old career is never coming back, that I will have to move on, and that I have mixed my final live show in theater.
Going with Option B.
The odds are not in my favor with the first choice. Waiting will get me nowhere. I don’t know what the next thing is going to look like, but I know what I would prefer: more control over my future, working from home, and working on things that are interesting and fun.
So it’s time to work on Career 2.0. Career 1.0 was great. I loved what I did for a living, and I miss parts of it in this laid-off life. I probably always will.
But things end. So it’s on to the next thing. As they say on Too Beautiful Too Live:
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Next –>
I don’t know what is next. I am working on learning to code, focusing on WordPress, as it’s something I have experience in.
I need to understand more of what I am getting in to, what the landscape and industry looks like, what is out there and what I have to offer.
And I want to know how other people are doing with all this. Has there ever been a bigger upheaval of workers than now? What are other people doing? What are they going through?
This –>
This site will serve as an ongoing log of what I’m learning, what I’m struggling with, what I’m trying to do, and a portfolio as I build it up.
And hopefully someone else will see the struggle, the learning and the path, and decide to do their own journey as well.
This isn’t going to be pretty. I don’t know if this is a good idea. I don’t know if doing this is a good idea or not. I could be shooting myself in the foot, showing more of what I don’t know and can’t do than what I can.
But it’s worth the shot. And if posting here does anything, it keeps me going, keeps me working, keeps me moving forward. I’ve tried the online classes, bought the courses, been down this path before. It was always hard, and it was always short lived. Now is my chance to push though.
Let’s see what happens next.