I had my dream job, but I walked away because it didn't pay enough

I had my dream job, but I walked away because it didn't pay enough.
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Illustration by April Y. Kasulis

This essay is one of 35 selected by a panel of judges for “Ambitions Interrupted,” a series from The GroundTruth Project and YouthVoices, its storytelling platform.

Name: Adriene Cabalinan

Age: 24

Dream job: Documentary filmmaker

City, Country: Midsayap, Philippines

Current job/school: Knowledge management officer at a humanitarian organization

Challenge: Low wages in the documentary film industry

My dream job is to travel around the Philippines to document amazing and inspiring untold stories through film. This has been my dream since the first documentary film I watched on National Geographic Channel when I was 12 years old. The Nat Geo team visited tribes in Africa and filmed their cultures. While watching that documentary, I vowed that one day I would do the same in my country – and I did.

I had my first job as a researcher at the most awarded TV documentary program in my country. I went around the country to film noteworthy stories about the struggles and hardships of Filipino people, and some inspirational stories too. In one of the stories we covered, I saw how an 11-year-old boy from the Manobo tribe in Davao del Norte cut down trees from the mountains, cut them into logs, carried the heavy logs on his shoulders for almost two hours to get to the road, and then waited for the buyer, who paid very little for all that hard work.

Stories like these deserve to be told to the rest of the world. Stories like these, I believe, should be the ones to get attention from the government and the general public. Documentary films can be a powerful medium to achieve just that.

The whole time I was with the documentary team was wonderful — I was living my dream. The hard part was not thinking of my finances. The wages I was getting were not enough to support my parents and siblings. Another hindrance was the really short airtime allotted for our film to be shown on national television. Sometimes it is difficult to compress a story into the required running time just to satisfy the mandate of TV, but that’s just how it is.

For practical reasons, I am now working for a private corporation that offers a much better salary, which helps my family a lot. But my passion for documentary filmmaking is still burning wildly inside of me, and I am worried that one day this fire will slowly die down because I will fail to continue fueling it.

But I am not losing hope. I have longed for this job since I was 12, and somehow I achieved it. Some unavoidable reasons led me away from my dream job, but I believe the same passion will lead me back.

This story was originally submitted to YouthVoices, a platform powered by The GroundTruth Project that encourages young people to share stories about the issues affecting their generation. Submit your own essays and answer new questions here, or learn more about global youth unemployment with this interactive map.

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