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

[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. :))