Why Don't You Do Photography?

[source]
With a new job comes the obvious questions – where will you be working? who's it for? what's it doing?

I find it a little difficult having done a creative degree that I still have to justify myself despite a few years working real, grown up jobs now.

My last job was in online retail and I used pretty much every skill I had going, including those learnt on my degree - there was a bit of studio and lifestyle photography involved - and that's great, jobs like that are hard to come by. With that being said, it doesn't mean there won't be a time to move on.
It was time to move on, the future of the company wasn't heading in a direction I wanted to join them in so I grabbed what I could at the time.

My new role as a 'Digital Marketing Executive' will hopefully help me add to the Marketing skill set that I want to build upon, while still allowing me to pursue the design aspects I was furthering in my old role. There probably won't be any Photography involved whatsoever, and I'm okay with that.

I guess when I left University I had idealistic views of freelancing or picture researching, then I also wanted to move out... I didn't really have the confidence to do those things back then and I'm probably much better now but at the moment, Photography is my way to de-stress and unwind.

Obviously I'll never say never and Photography is always going to be important to me, but my degree taught me so much more than how to take pretty pictures. Maybe, now realising at 25 that I'm more interested in Creative Marketing and Social Media makes me wonder whether it was the right degree to do but I will always maintain that 18 year olds don't know anything and certainly don't think about seven years down the line. It was right for me at the time and a degree is not a be all and end all of anything.

I think my 'career' has just ended up where it is by chance and while I hope I'll always be able to stay creative, I still feel kind of weird about justifying myself while making this new transition. Truthfully, if someone said I could take photographs of my cat all day, I'd jump at the chance but I can't see that being a readily available opportunity. Right now I'm genuinely just all good with 'doing me' and going wherever the next couple of years takes me. I want a mortgage and that grown up stuff, you know?