TheTraditionalProgesterone

So I'm about ready to submit all my materials for graduate applications, the one outstanding thing which a couple of my universities are requesting is a CV. I'm having a hard time figuring out what exactly to do with it. I didn't engage in extra-curricular activities or research during my undergraduate. My main strengths are my language skills and what I think (hope) is an excellent writing sample incorporating foreign-language primary sources, but that means I have basically nothing to put onto a CV, aside from simply listing my degree and languages. Can anyone share examples of what they put on theirs?

Ever since high school I dreamed of being a history professor, so much so that I never much cared about the bad prospects for employment. I wanted to aim for the top, and if I failed then that was just my fate. I always had a quite specific focus as well: the Ottoman Empire in the 16th and 17th Centuries, particularly with regard to the state and its responses to military, fiscal, and political challenges. Unfortunately I didn't exactly grasp just how steep some of the requirements for History programs were going to be and I don't think I took the necessary steps or made the necessary connections - being a recluse during undergrad didn't help me much. I was reading all the time, but didn't interface with my professors extensively. Enough to get a letter of recommendation and some guidance from our resident Ottoman specialist of course, but I didn't pursue the connections I could have made nearly well enough, though academically I did fine graduating in 3.5 years with a 3.8 GPA. My last year I did a bit more to build up my credentials, going to a summer Turkish-language program and studying abroad in Istanbul. Now I'm functionally fluent in Turkish, and what deficiencies I have will probably be gone before Fall 2016. That being said, primary sources are a wholly different problem as my Ottoman is barely good enough to squeeze out the most basic meaning from contemporary texts, and the professors who I'd have hoped would help me have been unforthcoming in this regard. This leaves me pretty limited when it comes to the quality of research I can engage in, but I've been doing my best to whip together a solid essay with at least the bare minimum of primary source references needed to be taken seriously. The crux of the matter is that I don't feel particularly competitive, and I'm not sure what I could do within a reasonable timeframe to correct this. In order to write academic papers on the Ottomans I need to be able to read the language, and I can't learn to read the language through any means other than brute-forcing it because I have so few resources to work with. Leaving that aside, lately I've started to take my head out of the cloud it's been in ever since high school and realize that having a secure career is more important to me than I'd thought it was. There's nothing I'd love more than to come away with a tenure-track position at a university or any other kind of secure reasonably-paying academic job that lets me raise a family, but I no longer feel like committing five years or more to university is worth it if I'm going to come out with barely a shot at a good job anyway. My youth is literally ticking away, something a lot of people here can probably relate to. Plus I met a nice girl in Turkey and I'm starting to realize that there's more to life than the mountains of books I've been surrounding myself with for all these years (even though I do still love them oh so much!) Yet... I just graduated with a BA in History. It's too late to do what so many people told me to do in high school and "study something useful". If I could go back in time to my high school self I know I'd tell him to either start learning Turkish immediately instead of waiting until junior year of university or to get out of history entirely and do more of that math he hated so much, but that's not happening now. I could go back to school and get a different BA, but that just takes me back to the original problem of being stuck in university for an ungodly amount of time, this time around not while doing what I love. I could go for an MA in history, use the opportunity to build up my skills until I am ready for the PhD, but that only maybe solves the problems I listed in the first paragraph, not the ones in the second. I've looked at plenty of internet pages with "alternative careers for history majors" and nothing seems terribly worthwhile or appealing, but surely there's some sort of obvious answer here that I'm just not seeing. How do I get out of academia and build a respectable career? Do I even need to get out? Maybe I'm just being overly anxious when I think I'm not competitive, I've simply never met anyone else in my field who I could compare myself to. Anyway, I'm not looking for a miracle solution, just your thoughts. This is an issue that's been pressing down on me for far, far too long.