My Journey from Higher Ed to Creative Freelancer: How I Found My True Passion

Hi friends!

Thanks for joining me back here as we continue the story of how I found myself pivoting from 8 to 5er working in education to creative freelancer.

Last time we left off with me finding myself checking a big item off my Bucket List…moving to South Carolina.

After graduating from graduate school, I packed up my few belongings and freshly signed master’s degree and headed south to Columbia, South Carolina where I would live for the next five years.

I was so lucky to have found a community in Columbia (thank you theSkimm and Rachael Silvey!). Never in my life did I feel so content. Maybe some of you can relate to this, but I felt like up until that point, I was always preparing for what came next. High school was getting ready for college, college was getting ready for my first job, and then when I found myself wholly not thriving in post-grad life, I couldn’t stop thinking about my next move to get myself out of those unhappy situations. For the first time, I was happy where I was, loving my job, spending time with amazing people, and just loving being content. You know that saying, “have you ever stopped and thought, “wow, I prayed for this. It’s here. It’s happening.”? That’s what I was experiencing for the first time in my life and it was glorious. 

As life normally does, things began to slowly change. Friends moved away, onto big new adventures, and I started to feel the pull to return to Ohio. I felt like my heart was in two places- I was loving UofSC and Columbia, but I was missing so many big things at home too. Friends were getting married and having babies, my sisters graduated from college and started their lives, and so much more. I always had a feeling that I would end up back in Ohio, but I started to realize that I wanted to go back on my terms, not one day when I was forced to because someone was sick or something bad happened. Working a fully in-person job was difficult because I couldn’t go back whenever I wanted or stay for as long as I wanted. It was hella expensive to travel and my little higher education salary could only afford 2-3 trips home each year. And so I began job searching…

At this point, I still thought Higher Education was my trajectory for the long haul. I had thought about other career paths here and there, but I was loving seeing the impact that I was making and truly the impact that the work and the people were making on me. So I knew coming from a fairly large public school, that none of the schools in Cleveland (my hometown) were going to be able to match that energy and opportunity. I thought that the only school that would rival UofSC was Ohio State University. After about a year and a half of job searching and a few failed attempts, I was finally offered a position in Student Life. When I tell you my heart was torn, I can still feel the conflicting emotions so deeply as if it just happened yesterday. My gut was telling me one thing and my heart was telling me another. I chose to follow my heart and in October of 2022, I moved to Columbus, Ohio and left a huge chunk of my heart in Columbia.

It’s no secret to those close to me that ever since I made that decision, I’ve been a permanent fixture on the struggle bus. My new job is not really what I thought it would be, I missed my friends, my coworkers, and the job that I was doing. The position I gave up at UofSC was quite literally my dream job and I had so much guilt feeling like I let people down. But, I was convinced I was doing it for the right reasons. I’m still unsure if that’s true, but here we are today. I am living in a city that I don’t particularly enjoy, stuck in an unfulfilling job surrounded by people that I truly don’t have genuine connections with, and have no clear vision of what’s next. 

Like many of you, I can imagine, I am tired of working in a dead-end job that I’m not in love with and not having control over my life. I want to travel and visit friends, I want to spend time with my loved ones, I want to LIVE while I’m alive. Work to live, not live to work as they say. So as I dreamt up what my perfect life would look like, it brought me back to creativity. I’ve always thought of myself as a creative person and opening my own Etsy shop during the pandemic was such an amazing way to release that side of me. But, I always thought that because I didn’t have  formal training or a degree in something like web design or graphic design, that I was stuck. Until one day I stumbled upon Mariah Althoff’s TikTok page…

More to come next time on my journey into the creative world of graphic design and how I found myself as a branding, logo, and web design freelancer.

Xo,

Alyssa