People don’t believe it, but being a new adult is hard. You are expected to know exactly what you want to do with your life and be well on your way to achieving it. No one wants to look at the fact that you start adulthood with two choices. You can either:

It feels like you’ll spend the rest of your adult life picking the lesser of two evils.

From a very young age, being the play-now-work-never type, I caught on to this fact and said “Forget that, I’m gonna be my own boss and open a coffee shop!” How cute right? Little did I know, even as your own boss you still have to work hard. To add to the disappointment, I learned that there are very many people who have thought of the whole coffee shop thing. 

Growing up in the ever-growing city of Atlanta, it feels like there is a new coffee shop opening every week. You realize there are a lot of people trying to do exactly what you’re doing, and it becomes very discouraging as a new adult. It really starts to feel like not only will you not be able to do what you wanted, but you also don’t know if there’s anything you CAN do. This is why I decided to leave the saturated city. Sure there’s excitement and there’s things to do, places to see, people to meet, but if you look hard enough, you can find that anywhere.

Lake Charles, Louisiana is where I found it. Sure, they only have 1 food truck, 1 local coffee shop, and only a handful of restaurants, but as an aspiring entrepreneur, all I see is opportunity. It’s the blank page I’ve been looking for to write my future. I realized the city didn’t want me. It wanted a more trendy, more experienced, more adult version of me that I just could’t be. Here in Lake Charles, I am free to create the life I’ve dreamed of living.

I guess the lesson learned is, you don’t have to mold your dreams to fit into your location. Sometimes, if you look hard enough, you can find a location that has been waiting for you all along.