Pursuing jewelry as a career was never really my dream.
I think some people do have dreams and they work at it and work at it and work at it until they get there. But jewelry was always a hobby for me.
After trying out so many different job types and looking through my resume, there was a time in 2015 when I didn't know what to do next. I had a serious chat with myself and I looked through all the things I had done from classes I had taken to jobs that inspired me, and reviewed them all. I asked myself where I excelled the most, and making jewelry was the thing that stood out.
I had taken a class in beadwork when I was 14 years old. The teacher at the time was apprehensive about accepting a teenager into her class but decided to take a chance. I sat in the class, listened to the instructions and finished the project before anyone else. These other class members were much older than me and had had decades of experience on me.
Then I took another bead class and the same thing happened. These bead classes steadily got more advanced, but I kept walking out with a finished project and somehow I just understood how to manipulate beads and colors and threads easily.
I never thought I was better than anyone at beadwork, but for some reason it made sense to me.
A decade later, I took my first metal course and the same thing happened again. I wasn't better at working with metal than other beginners, but the steps and the process made sense to me. It was logical and I absorbed it quickly.
When I decided to pursue jewelry as a career, what I envisioned was a lifetime of learning and improving. I knew that the jeweler I had set out to be, was going to become a totally different jeweler from now. I loved this idea of a lifetime of growth because I knew that that was an anomaly with other career paths where you're expected to do more-or-less the same thing and do it consistently. That notion was what always turned me off from applying to jobs because I am someone who loves change, and learning, and creating, and being inspired.
Accepting jewelry as a career eventually became my dream, but it was never obvious from the start.
To dreams unfolding,
Caitlin