My life's work

[chanaleh]

ablock sent me mail this morning saying,

when you were in high school. did you know what you wanted to do w/ your life? what job?

Well, pretty much, yeah: book publishing. That is -- in high school I guess I expected to want to do editing rather than production/typesetting, but that was more because I didn't know how to use any graphics tools (and didn't know design was a visual skill I would turn out to have).

When I was six years old, I wanted to write books. This was my career plan throughout childhood. (And I did write lots of little stories, and make up lots of other ones in my head. I was a damn sight more prolific then than I've ever been since, I fear.)

Then when I was in about 7th grade, it occurred to me that people actually get PAID to do PROOFREADING and other kinds of book editing. And that this might be a somewhat more reliable profession than creative writing. So that was what I wanted to do ever since. (Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also about the time I started writing poetry -- some of which I still don't hate -- to the virtual exclusion of prose. Did I, at age 12, give myself permission to quit engaging with fiction as a discipline? Because I was being pragmatic about my life path? *sigh*)

Still, I knew from right then (and, in all fairness, probably for my entire conscious life) that I would major in English in college. I am about the only person I know who (a) knew this going in and (b) never even considered any other choices. Yes, there are other things I could have done well if I'd pursued them -- even, dare I say, math and science. But they weren't what I was about.

Avocational note: For most of high school, my leisure pursuits were more about performing arts: music, theater, even dance (since I did swing choir, which included dance routines, which I adored). In college, I dropped back out of that and focused on publishing-related interests: poetry, layout for student magazines, the school paper. This was how I learned to use PageMaker and QuarkXPress, which is the skill set I eventually parlayed into my current paying career. For which I am grateful. But it's only since I started at MIT that I've really come back around and started doing music and theater and even dance again, in my Copious Free Time. For which I am also grateful.

This whole aspect of my selfhood came up in discussions with Jonathan-my-jo earlier this year. He's still trying, at age 31, to figure out what it is that he most feels like doing with his life (for money, anyway). And here I've never known what it's like not to know. (Which maybe makes it hard for me to help other people uncover their focus. What do you mean, you don't have a clear sense?)

Anyone else?

Comments

Somewhat more complicated

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

There was some point in my life when I made a realization: if I studied long enough, and was good at it, someone would pay me to do it someday. Plus my dad was a professor, and we seemed to do OK. (I didn't fully grasp at the time the fact that magnetics engineers were in a, hm, somewhat unusual situation in the U.S. in the second half of the twentieth century.) Also I had a couple of really good high school history teachers, so I was pretty sure I would do history, which appealed to me as a generalist field that stressed the ability to write well.

Selecting a particular field of history in college was more challenging. The first idea was to be an archaeologist or a Bible scholar or something like that (provoking my parents to see me as a starving Talmud student), but my first year of Biblical Hebrew convinced me that I would never be very good at that (or anything else involving extreme fluency in a foreign language). An advisor turned me on to cultural studies and history that focused on "uses of the past," so that I made a transition to modern religious history in my work.

I got two equally good offers for grad school: one was to do American Jewish history at Brandeis, the other was to do straight-up American history at Hopkins. I liked Hopkins better and couldn't imagine teaching Jewish history to undergrads, so I chose Hopkins. It is one of those decisions I think about a lot, because my diss. ended up being about American Jewish history after all. If I had gone to Brandeis I'd probably have an academic job right now; I sort of created a square peg-round hole problem on the job market with what I did. On the other hand, I met my wife in Baltimore and you know the rest, so I can't be too disappointed. And in a certain way I've always been a generalist and more interested in the forest than the trees, so Hopkins represented a choice about the kind of intellectual horizon I would have as a person, and I can't say that it was the wrong choice for me.

The publishing end of it is more complicated. I always enjoyed writing and edited at the U. of Chicago student newspaper. (You proofreaders were the real freaks at that point in my life.) I also wrote half of a really awful novel in my year between college and grad school, and part of me still has vague, artistic pretensions. Anyway, after looking for a job that I could work while finishing the last parts of my diss., I was hired by a substandard Internet textbook publishing company in Medford. I had applied for a job as a content editor, but only after I started did I realize that they had hired me to be a QC guy (I somehow did well on an editing test). I never thought of myself as a copyeditor or a grammar perfectionist, but I got something of a trial by fire and slowly learned the craft. Eventually they did let me write content for them, but when I got laid off, my copyediting experience helped me land freelance jobs, one of which turned into the position I have today (which is more managerial than either content or copy editing).

In the process I've been converted into a mean proofreading freak, mostly because I am annoyed at having to correct the mistakes of other people who I've paid to proofread. But it certainly isn't what I saw myself doing at this point in my life, so I can sympathize with your friend. 31 is definitely a point by which you can look back at the choices you've made and assess them. For me, it is hard because I still know that being a professor is what I want to do, but I'm not quite good enough at one or the other of the positioning skills required to land the job. I don't have much choice but to cast around for something else to find satisfying.

The other thing is, I also always had a feeling in the back of my mind that this is how things would turn out.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

This whole aspect of my selfhood came up in discussions with Jonathan-my-jo earlier this year. He's still trying, at age 31, to figure out what it is that he most feels like doing with his life (for money, anyway). And here I've never known what it's like not to know. (Which maybe makes it hard for me to help other people uncover their focus. What do you mean, you don't have a clear sense?)

I'm still trying as well. For a while, in late high school/early college, I had decided that I wanted to be a therapist. I changed my mind in sophomore year of college, though. Since then I've had some vague ideas, but never anything concrete, and never really ended up finding opportunities to follow into something more directed. The job I have now is the first one I've ever had that has given me some hope of finding direction and an actual career path. Then again, I have never been very ambitious, and have always been a "work to live" rather than a "live to work" sort of person.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

I never had a sense of what I wanted to do for work at any age below 20. I'm 33 now and still am not completely sure. What I have done is parlay my voice and ability to usually not get miffed into my current job, which pays middlin decent and has good perks. I have lots of ways I could go and to some degree am not sure I want to be stuck to one track; but I'm slowly recognizing I can't do it all. Not if I live the normal lifetime. I'm considering investing in a few hundred extra years of good health.

[greenlily.livejournal.com]

This sounds familiar. I've never known, either, what it was like not to have a focus. (Which has in fact helped to alienate me from both my siblings and almost everyone else I met before about age 20.)In my case, though, the focus was avocational. There just wasn't anything to which I could pay attention, for long enough, other than music. The fact that I wasn't actually all that good at music never really caused me to waver from my focus. (reality is not my strong point :))

I majored in music at college because I decided, when I was around fifteen, that I'd like to be a teacher. Either a music teacher or a general elementary school teacher who used a lot of music in the classroom. I had two bases for this decision: 1. I liked kids and 2. it kept my parents pretty far off my back while I did as much extracurricular music and theater as I wanted. (I did still get grounded when my grades slipped, but at least they didn't much pester me to drop the music and Do Something Useful.)

When I got to college and visited both the music department and education program advisors, they told me the same thing: "If you want to keep your option of being a music teacher open, you have got to major in music. You can get into a M.S. of Elementary Ed. program with *any* undergrad area of study, but a graduate program in music ed. requires a B.A. in music." This was mostly true. (They forgot to mention that, for all practical purposes, it was impossible to go into any grad. program in education without some teaching experience. And that, if I was serious about going into a grad program in music ed., I should've picked an undergrad school with a music department that offered more directed support for undergrads. But the advisors had no reason to think I wouldn't find some other way of getting teaching experience and support in my field of study, so I don't regard what they told me as bad advice.) More to the point, it let me spend yet another four years doing exactly what I wanted.

Brandeis' music department had, at the time, two tracks. One was the pre-professional track, for real musicians. The other was the liberal arts track, for people who didn't know what the heck they wanted and felt like spending 4 years doing music while they figured it out. I was in the lib-arts track. I assume this is why they let me stay in the department in spite of my getting C's in most of my academic music courses. Also why they let me graduate with only one year of private lessons in my primary instrument. If I'd gone to almost any other school, or majored in anything else at Brandeis, I would certainly not have been allowed to continue in a field of study where I wasn't achieving. They would either have made me switch majors or strongly advised me to transfer schools, and my life would have been very different. Hindsight is 20-20.

I don't actually regret it, though. I discovered after graduation that organizational skills I had to learn to survive high school and college could be transferred to a marketable skill (office administration). I discovered this by working for two separate companies which would not have hired me if I didn't have a music background. It took me a while to realize that the skills I use in administrative work (basically, creating order out of chaos) are things I've always applied to whatever else I was working on--it had simply never occurred to me that I could get paid for applying those things to stuff that other people were working on.

In a lot of ways, the past couple of years have been emotionally chaotic for me (the chaos having begun when I finally started a grad program in education and discovered that I didn't have any of the skills I needed for it, and several skills that were only going to get in the way). My job has been one of the few things that's kept me sane. A lot of that is because what I'm doing here feels like I'm finally doing what I was supposed to do--putting stuff in order. Confirming my selfhood, I guess. (And *yes* my life would've been easier if I'd done what nine million people have been telling me to do, since I was four years old, and become a librarian. :))

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

At the age of five I knew I wanted to be a "builder of everything".

It took another fifteen years to figure out that what I meant by this was "generalist" rather than "architect".

[laurens10.livejournal.com]

When I was small, I wanted to be an archaeologist.

Then, when I reached high school, I wanted to become a writer, and I spent a lot of time writing. My teachers told me that I was good at it. I applied to Brandeis with an eye to either their creative writing program or their comparative lit program. Once I arrived at Brandeis, I decided against entering in the creative writing program. I chickened out; I didn't want to compete in order to get in. Instead, I focused on comp lit, but after realizing I could never learn enough Russian in my short time at Brandeis to compete against the Russian students in a Russian lit class, I changed from comparative lit to something less demanding, European Cultural Studies.

Junior year, literary theory smacked me on the head, deflated my wind, and sent me into a place of academic despair. I kept my major but bailed from any interest in the study of literature. I started a minor in computer science, since I always had an interest in computers... but more as a hobby than a profession.

After graduation and three years in the computer world, I realized that my interest in computers would and should be a hobby rather than a profession. Basically, I have no ambition. I like programming, but I never want to be a head programmer. Its a nice way of making money, but if I wanted to do something meaningful for myself in my life, I should work with my talents and what I have desire for.

Now, I am in grad school in religion with the hopes that I can enter into a PhD program relating to history so that one day I can research and write. I guess a historian is like an archaeologist. In some odd manner, I've come full circle.

[skreeky]

The fact that I've known exactly what I wanted to do since I was 16 is actually really getting in the way.

One aspect of my youthful self that I'm rather sorry to have lost as I got older - all of my major life decisions occurred in about 30 seconds each. Career path. Moving to Boston. That sort of thing. Pure intuition and I have never regretted any of them. I wish I still trusted myself that much but I suppose I have more to lose now.

So I was sitting there watching TV one afternoon and this TRULY HORRIBLE commercial for a local taco place came on the TV. I wasn't trained enough at the time to know technically what was wrong with it, but I can tell you now: it was recorded on a camcorder using the default mic, incorrect whitebalance (caused skin tone to be light green), and had an awful script. I don't know if they bothered to hire actors, but I think not, as the people they showed eating looked like they were bored silly and didn't particularly like the food.

I had one thought. "Geez, *I* could do better than *that*."

I can say this. I do, in fact, do better than that.

That's about all I can say, though. By the end of freshman year, I no longer imagined I would have a successful career as a producer jet-setting between NYC and LA, in demand for my cutting-edge music video style. It didn't take me long to figure out that I didn't have the kind of financial resources it takes to get the connections to land the entry level jobs. (For those unfamiliar, TV internships are all unpaid, without expenses reimbursement, and they work you to death. You are somehow supposed to do this and still eat and pay rent. I don't know anyone that managed it who was NOT living off their well-to-do parents.)

So I looked at as the one chance I would have to do what I really wanted to do. I had a blast. Sure enough, I graduated, was unemployed for a long time before I could even find temp work, temped in reception/secretarial for a year, and then was hired at MIT where I'd been temping, as a secretary. Sure, I applied for every photo/video/film job I saw, even the ones I knew would be excruciatingly boring. A couple of times I was in the top 2 applicants and lost out because I was asking $18K (to live on in Boston, even in 1994 - that's not much!). I never thought I'd see the inside of an edit suite again.

My current position pretty much fell in my lap through a friend. I am so grateful to have a job that includes any sort of production for which I get paid, even if it's just taping and editing campus events. Sure, the paperwork and administration part makes me want to rip my brain out. But it's something, and I occasionally even get to teach.

Given my current financial problems, I get into these arguments with Jon because he thinks I need a "new career" so I can make enough money to live comfortably. Exactly what the hell else am I going to do? I really can't fathom it. In school, I was good at everything. Really, everything. Nothing challenged me at all. But the more I did video, the more I loved it because it draws on everything from physics to psychology. It is physically and mentally challenging, far more so than it looks - ask anyone that's learned to do a good job at it.

So I'm fighting this thing in me that can't imagine what else to do. There must be something, ANYTHING that would get me out of this dead-end I'm in.

I just can't imagine what wouldn't bore me to tears.

[(Anonymous)]

Is it a dead end because Jon says it is or because you think it is? Would it be possible to find a comparable position at a more interesting place, such as another university in the Boston area? Do you have an interest in doing documentary filmmaking (either PBS-style or "behind the scenes" style)?

[skreeky]

OF COURSE I'd rather be in ANY type of full time production. This is like saying you'd like to be a full time professional actor! DUH!

Larger schools aren't hiring me. I send them resumes yearly to make sure. Production jobs generally pay about $8K less than I am making, except at GBH which would require me to have either the connections I couldn't afford to get or a lengthy production resume I don't have. I send them resumes every year to make sure.

I would have to be a complete idiot to quit a perfectly good job in this economy. I am not an idiot.

The discussion with Jon is variations on a theme. The theme goes like this.

Jon: You need a better job so you don't have these money problems.
Me: My job gets me more money in a far more stable environment than any other job in my field for which I am remotely qualified.
Insert elaboration on this theme
Jon: You need to switch careers.
Me: I don't want to switch careers. Other careers suck, except for the ones that make even less money.
Insert elaboration on this theme
Jon: How about teaching full time?
Me: That would require grad school. You're funny. And it's not like faculty are rolling in dough.

At which point it degrades into variations on the theme of whether I can afford grad school, which I cannot, and whether "we" can afford grad school, which is a completely different issue that I have gone into great depth about in my own journal (locked area) and won't be discussing publicly.

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

IMHO, you are lucky. Because you've found a field that a) you still love and b) are good at. And you've found a job that's a) in that field and b) stable. Hang in there! Don't take any crap from Jon on this! Go girl!

[navrins]

I always knew what I wanted to do (though sometimes I was wrong - once upon a time I thought I'd be a science fiction writer) until a couple of years ago, when I got all confused, and fully expected to quit programming permanently. But it was actually a combination of depression (now resolved, yay) and realization that I have a limit to the size of project I can handle. Up to that limit, I'm great; above that limit I fall apart. So now I know I need to keep working on small projects, which I enjoy more and am really good at, and not try to Architect Big Systems.

But basically from fifth grade or so on, I pretty much expected to follow the path I'm on. I never fully committed to it (like, I thought I might major in aero/astro or mechE or civilE), but I never really turned from the path. Sometimes I wish I were in a more physical-thing kind of business, like designing bridges or buildings or spaceships, but I wouldn't be good at it.

[goljerp]

In brief, yes I thought I knew what I wanted to do in High School: be a professor, probably of History. Now I'm neither in History, nor in academia. I wrote more about this, but then decided that I'd rather put it in my journal under "friends" protection, because, well, this is not an academic question for me at the moment!

[coraline]

it only occurred to me sometime after college that while i'd never been very sure of what i wanted to do, i'd always been a terrible intellectual snob -- not really realizing how lucky i'd been to never have a job that wasn't intellectually demanding and stimulating.
i thought i wanted to be a librarian for a while, but that was mostly because i liked books and didn't like people.
then i decided i wanted to go to MIT and probably "do science."
i guess that counts as having had a direction since age 14 because well, went to MIT, am doing science. the specifics aren't really what i would have guessed, but i'm not complaining :)ˇ

[msmidge.livejournal.com]

Well, what do you know? This very night, as as part of my doctoral money-soliciting process, I have to write an essay about how I decided on the current incarnation of my would-be career. How do I explain to them that I'm pursuing an anthropology/Jewish studies degree because I couldn't hack it as a professional bowler? (Okay, that's not true.) All I have come up with so far is that each time I think I have a pretty good idea of what I might do, I find something that works better so I'd rather do that. So that takes a long time, but at least now I know I don't want to be a journalist or an editor or an human egg broker or a high school teacher or a religious school teacher or someone who has anything to do with teaching children at all unless I get to decide which ones I teach and whether their parents get to have any say in it. :P If only I'd gone to Harvard as an undergrad, I could also know for sure if I didn't want to be rich. Such is not my fate. But it's not that I have no sense at all of what I want to do, it's more that I don't know enough about the logistical, day-to-day stuff that goes with each job before I get into it, for example the public schools' obsessive fear of getting sued, or the freaky two-facedness of colleagues in a law office, and I am not willing enough to put up with it in service of a job I'm not that sure I want anyway. At least now I get paid to do my homework and make a photocopy once every few days. That I can live with. :) Of course none of this is appropriate material for my solicitous essay so I have a long way to go. Maybe I should finish the cat sweater I started making yesterday instead.

[tcb.livejournal.com]

when you were in high school. did you know what you wanted to do w/ your life? what job?

short answer: no fucking way.

slightly longer answer: I thought I did.

really long answer:

when I was really little, I wanted to be a duck. I wanted to fly..

when I was slightly older, I wanted to be a garbageman. I wanted to ride on the back of a truck, hanging onto that bar. hell, it's still in that category of 'jobs I'd try for a couple of weeks'.

when I was in junior high and a lower classman in high school, I fancied myself a writer. I enjoyed writing, and thought I'd be a writer.

in my upper class years, I started to think there was no way I could make a living as a writer, and so when it came time to go to college, I decided to go the CompSci route, not really knowing what I would do with it.

after one year of college, I went to work, and haven't been back since.

for awhile, I had jobs, and then, I had a career. then, I thought I knew what I wanted to be; a hotshot network engineer. I could have been, too, but the market and my own lack of social networking prevented that.

I still don't really know what I want to do "when I grow up", but what I have figured out is that, for me, it doesn't really matter what I do, as long as I work with cool people, in a cool environment, in a high profile position, occasionally being able to program, and feeling like I can see the direct influence of my work.

what would I like to do? I'd like to be an astronomer, writer, chronicler, analyst, historian, and traveller.

for now, though, I'm pretty happy being who I am; a solver of problems, a bridger of gaps, and a doer of things.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

When I was about two I knew I wanted to be an astronaut. Sometime in kindergarten I decided the best thing to do for this would be to major in astrophysics, so even though as far as anyone could tell I was good at both the math stuff and the reading stuff I focused on math and science.

When I was about eight my vision went to hell, nixing that plan, but I was too busy being a generally stable kid to bother adjusting my worldview.

When I was thirteen, I met my future husband, which allowed me (although I was no longer generally stable ;) to further avoid adjusting my worldview, because I could look at the future and see something there, and even though it didn't fit in the correct 'vocational' box, well, ya know, close enough.

(I went to college and did not, in fact, major in astrophysics. Actually, I hated freshman physics and I'm terrible at it and I didn't learn until rather later that it's nothing like the rest of physics, which I probably would have enjoyed. I majored in theoretical-as-hell mathematics and classics, neither of which lends itself to a career path.)

I realized somewhere around junior or senior year that I have no idea what on earth I want to do when I grow up and it's been bothering me ever since, because I want to be one of those people with a Calling. Right now I'm avoiding it by being in grad school ;), but I'll get my MA in May and then, sigh, I'll have to deal again. I think my plan is to apply for anything that looks interesting (with particular focus on teaching high school Latin and/or math, on technical writing, and on anything that lets me take classes for free at Harvard), and if I turn out not to like it after a few years, I can always do something else....Then all I have to do is figure out how to stave off dilletantism and discontinuity :/.

[kalessin.livejournal.com]

Back in high school, I wanted to run the big computers, like the PDP-11/70 we had (a large-ish minicomputer, which meant that it didn't need it's own environmental chamber and was only the size of a 1970s station wagon upended on its side). It took a while, and computers have gotten much smaller, but I'm a sysadmin. Wish that I could make it pay right now... (working on it now...)

The very first time I worked on stage lighting was in seventh grade at Solomon Schechter, for a production of "The Merchant of Venice". I did lighting in high school, worked backstage at rock shows, and learned lighting design at Umass Boston. Wish there were decent work available, and that I had more contacts in pro theater... (working on it now...)