Marina Maywood on her Career Choices, wanted to be a flight attendant

Some things just don’t work out (a history of my career choices)
Life is funny, what with the curveballs it throws you.

by Marina Maywood from her blog

My first career choice was art, but I don’t know if that was truly my decision… When I was little everybody said that I was a very talented artist, so that’s where I should be headed. I took classes to further develop my skills. But thinking of art as a job — as a source of money — made it all become daunting. I paint for myself. I’d love to have my work seen, but to part with it — I’m not sure I could do that. And I would hate to put a deadline on creativity… So, I made a choice to leave art as something that I will continue to love, and not risk losing part of that by sticking with it as a career. As soon as I could write, I also toyed around with the idea of starting a career doing that. But I treat it the same as art for now — I write what I want, when I want, and I don’t have deadlines. If someone wants to read what I write, great, and if not, I don’t care. My livelihood doesn’t depend on it!

I dabbled in a few things like music, drama, and ballet, and even tried to become a freediver, but those hobbies were only child’s play… What truly interested me for most of my life was the idea of becoming a flight attendant. To me they always seemed so glamorous, so busy, so important — always going places, and getting on that plane before all the passengers like they own the joint! I waited patiently until I turned 18 to fill out the application for a flight attendant training program. I procrastinated a bit though, having been distracted by family issues, so I waited a few months. I thought, "Hey, the travel business will always be there." Then 9/11 happened! All of a sudden, people were afraid to fly, the airlines started losing money like crazy, and of course everyone stopped hiring flight attendants and started lowering salaries. I didn’t know what to do! My career plan became irrelevant… My hopes were completely dashed!

So, I set out to do something challenging with my time while I waited for the travel industry to turn back around. I began a 5-year Master’s program in linguistics and interpreting. Had I stuck with it, by the time I graduated I would have been able to interpret in real time from and to any of the following languages: English, Russian, French, and German. Unfortunately, I had two things going against me when it came to that program… See, I pick up languages fairly fast, however I need to look for logic patterns to be able to do that. Just my luck, aside from the languages I already mentioned, I also had to take Latin. And let me tell you, there is no logic in Latin conjugation… At least not as far as I could find! So I was struggling with that class, which is quite an unusual feeling for me. Not only that, but I kept not being able to find a certain classroom inside the huge twisted building of the main campus! And missing class is never good.

I gave up on the whole linguistics idea, using the fact that I didn’t like the location of the school as an excuse… I picked another college, and a program that my parents were not against — marketing communication. By the time I got my degree, I knew that market research was what interested me the most out of the fields I’d just studied. (Though I also worked in fundraising and for a local government agency while in school.) So I found work as a programmer at a market research company, which was great at first, but… As time went on, I realized that I wasn’t doing anything important with my life. I was making money, but the projects I worked on didn’t do anyone any good (aside from helping companies increase sales and stuff like that), I had no social life because of the long hours I worked, and I was always exhausted. One time I even had to work on a project which, while I cannot mention any details, was morally disgusting! On top of that, while I was expected to do the work of other people in my department who didn’t have the skills that I had, I was not given appreciation for the extra work. So, after several conversations with my boss, during which I tried to correct the situation to no avail, I decided to quit my job.

I had already done a few adult shoots just for fun (and because I was curious) by the time I quit my full-time job, and decided to go in that direction for a while. I had met a lot of really awesome people in the industry, and it seemed like a lot of fun. And it was a lot of fun for a long time, until I started seeing people lose themselves to addictions, or become catty and jealous of other people, or lose touch with reality after living a lifestyle of fast money, fast spending sprees, and endless meaningless or no-fun sex. The whole scene has become a bit depressing, and I don’t want to feel that way about something that has been so great to me in the past.

So yet again, I have decided to leave a job. I am focusing on bar/night life work right now, and probably some dancing in the near future. I myself don’t go out very much, but as a job I think it’s fun. And meanwhile, I am waiting for the airline industry to get back on its feet…