I swear, that last job, the one where I was supposed to be a regional sales trainer, it just sucked the life right out of me. Every single morning I’d wake up feeling like I was dragging a wet blanket through sludge just to get to my desk. I remember looking at my spreadsheet, just columns and numbers, and thinking, “Is this it? Is this what twenty years of trying hard gets you?”
I always felt like I was supposed to be somewhere else, you know? Like my brain was always running a side story, a movie in the background that no one else could see. Maybe that’s the Pisces thing they talk about, the constant escaping into your own head. But when you’re staring down a quarterly budget review, being stuck in your head just gets you a warning from HR.
The universe had to step in and give me a hard shove, apparently. I wasn’t going to quit that comfortable salary on my own. It happened maybe three years ago now. I slipped on some ice getting out of the car, just a stupid, ridiculous fall, and completely wrecked my left ankle. I needed surgery and was totally sidelined for almost ten weeks. Couldn’t drive, couldn’t commute, couldn’t even stand at the kitchen counter without leaning on a stack of cookbooks.
My boss tried to have me do remote work, but honestly, trying to teach negotiation tactics via a choppy Zoom call with my foot propped up on three pillows was a joke. I just stopped logging in after the first week. They knew I was useless. So, I had nothing but time and a rapidly dwindling supply of painkillers.
What I Started Messing With When I Was Bored
You can only watch so much daytime TV before your brain turns to mush. I needed to actually do something. I dug out an old sketchpad that was hiding under a pile of bills. It had been years, maybe since college, since I actually drew anything besides stick figures on a napkin.
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First, I tried the drawing. It was terrible. My hands were shaky, everything looked flat, and I couldn’t get the proportions right on anything. I tried painting with some cheap acrylics my niece left behind. It looked like a kindergarten project. I threw it all away after three days. Failed practice one.
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Then, I went for the writing thing. I figured, hey, I’m always dreaming up stories, right? So I opened a document and just started typing out the plot for a psychological thriller that had been bubbling in my head. I wrote maybe forty pages. I loved the process of getting the feeling of the scene down, the atmosphere, all that watery, emotional stuff. But when I read it back, the dialogue was clunky and the plot made zero sense. Failed practice two, but I learned something.
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The music thing almost got me. I pulled out an old guitar I hadn’t touched since the nineties. My fingers were bloody and my chords sounded horrendous. I could play the tunes in my head, but getting them out through the strings? Forget it. But just humming and writing down lyrics, trying to capture a mood—that part felt good. Like a release.
I realized that for all the practical jobs out there, what my brain really wanted was to filter reality through an emotional lens and shape it into something else. It wasn’t the technical skill I was lacking; it was the sheer force of turning feeling into a product. That’s why the traditional creative jobs, the ones where you need crazy technical precision, didn’t stick for me.
The Actual Pivot: Focusing on the Vibe
The turning point came when I started using my phone camera. Not for professional shots, just for capturing what felt heavy or light or lonely in the room. Mood shots, basically. The way the dust motes hit the sunlight, the shadow of a coffee cup, the patterns in the rug. I wasn’t thinking about composition or aperture, just about the vibe. I started posting these random photo-essays on a ridiculous-sounding personal site I made up.
One day, a guy who ran a small online journal that focused on urban anxiety and quiet living somehow found my site. He liked the ‘vibe,’ as he called it. He didn’t want my sales expertise; he wanted that watery, slightly melancholic feeling my photos and short captions gave off. He asked if I could write some short “poetic summaries” and take “atmospheric photos” for his articles. Not news, not analysis, just mood. I thought he was nuts, but he offered to pay something.
That was the light switch moment. It wasn’t about being a professional novelist or a gallery artist. It was about leveraging that Pisces need to interpret the world emotionally. I wasn’t just taking photos; I was building emotional environments for someone else’s content.
I finally told my old corporate job I wasn’t coming back. The money was scary thin at first, I won’t lie. I took on little gigs: writing short, emotional scripts for local businesses’ social media, doing ‘mood board’ photography for interior designers who hated sterile shots, and writing copy for non-profits who needed to pull on the heartstrings.
I call myself a Narrative Vibe Consultant now, which sounds pretentious as hell, but it pays the bills. It’s a mix of writing, visual interpretation, and empathy—the exact stuff my brain was doing when I was supposed to be doing spreadsheets. The hours are insane sometimes, and the feast-or-famine income still gives me a jump scare, but I don’t feel dead inside anymore. When I finish a project, I feel like I actually put a piece of myself out there, instead of just trading hours for dollars. If you’re a Pisces struggling to fit in a box, you need to stop trying to be the most technically perfect artist and just become the most honest emotional interpreter you can be. That’s the real trick.
