Something Bigger

    By nature I'm a helper. I'm a helper perhaps even when people don't want my help. But giving, sharing compassion, understanding, and a helping hand is what makes me feel like I'm on top of the world and at my most alive. As I prepare to go to job interviews to jobs I don't want to do--that I know I don't thrive in--the knowledge that in my mind I'm not doing something 'bigger' races through my brain.

     'Bigger' is a relative term. And it can be so different depending on the person involved. To the boy who comes from a gang infested world and makes it out alive and works an honest job in retail, that is certainly Bigger. To a woman who quits her job to take care of her mother with cancer, that is definitely Bigger. For myself personally, Bigger is making a difference in the lives of children. I was raised in an low income one-parent household, and my aspirations were for being a teacher. But in my heart, even as a kid hiding in the library devouring books, I knew I wanted to be more than my surroundings. I knew I was different than the other kids. Even when I dreamed of being a teacher, I dreamed of being a famous teacher. Something Bigger.

    Running around in a power suite stepping on people, crunching numbers, and presenting power point presentations to corporate conglomerates was never--and still isn't--my calling. It isn't how I feel I can move the world--or at least make a dent in it. But our future is our children. And to know that I can give them inspiration, new perspectives, help their imaginations grow, and show them that some one cares about their thoughts and dreams, is the thing the drives my soul.To know I touched a life, a spirit, and through them, to someday change the world is my aim; whether through writing or signing. Sitting in an office counting the hours down to when I get home from a job where I feel like another cog in the machine would kill me.

    So why am I doing this? Why am going to interview in places I know I would be miserable and feel helpless and unimportant? Because there is nothing else for me at the moment. Most interpreting jobs in schools have already been filled and I need a specific certification before I'm even considered. And so for now I must be a number until I can get myself out of it. But I will be something Bigger. Regardless of my location, and the current job that I have, I will find ways out of it. I was born to create. I was born to imagine, to feel, to describe. I was born to be a writer. Nothing else will do.

    And how am I going to be a help to children if I'm starving in the streets or not able to pay an electric bill? So I must work. I just wish it had been for Signing, and not for trying to find a receptionist job. But the economy and timing was off--or perhaps right. Life will throw curve balls, and sometimes the weight of them seems impossible to survive. But we do move forward, and often because of it we grow stronger.

I'm not sure how long it will take, or even how it will happen, but I will be Something Bigger.

I can't be anything else.