As you can see in the picture, my attempt is to show that I have two different sides of myself.  I believe a lot of us in this world live in this same reality.  First, we have the professional side.  This is the side that puts on a bright smiling face, shows up to work and does the job that needs to be done.  For some people living on side A, there’s little to no foolery going on at the job, and coworkers no very little about your social activities and your personal life after you take off your ‘professional’ hat.  A lot of us live most of our days at work, so these are some of the people that we spend a good chunk of our time with, so they may perceive this to be our ‘normal’.  It’s rare or almost impossible for them to see how you are on a Friday night-Sunday evening, and if they do, it might shock them.

The second part of yourself is who I like to call your “after 5” self.  This is the person that a lot of people in your professional life don’t see.  This is the person you let loose on social media, the person who has a totally different set of clothes to wear on the weekend, and let’s not discuss the type of activities we get into on the weekend.  This also may be the person with a different creative venture in life. For example, by day; I’m a state government supervisor, but by night, I’m a blogger, writer, full time mommy/wife/bestie/homie/wine aficionado-in-training and turn up enthusiast 😎

Like I said, most of us live two different lives; and if you’re like me, sometimes it gets hard for others to balance or even understand that you have to change your personality to fit into your professional realm.  I heard a discussion about this once, and they called it duality.  I realized that this might be a little bit of something I’m going through right now.  Sometimes I feel like I am living in two different worlds.

I have a hard time balancing my personal life with my professional life, because I am very much a millennial. I am very much into social media, very much into wanting to be social and fun. I understand that I am not going to make some of the immature and irresponsible decisions I made in college now that I am an adult; however, I do know that some of the things that I do now are things I wouldn’t want my coworkers to know about in my professional settings.
A lot of times, people find that there is a struggle to be genuine while in their workplace, because who they are in the workplace might not be deemed “appropriate” for the climate of culture of their work environment.  I mean, how can you pride yourself on being uniquely you, when you have to censor yourself to please your work environment? #LeStruggle

As I continue to navigate through the murky waters of professional adulthood and my passionate side hustle of being a creative, I guess I will be also finding ways to define myself in both of these worlds as well as learning how to be my most authentic self in each one.  One thing I have learned is that respect and honesty hold true no matter what area of life you’re in, and people will value you a lot more when you’re honest about who you are up font instead of trying to be someone you’re not.

So, here’s to all of us working our way through our duality.  May we find a way to live and love both lives at once, Lol!!!