Hubuduh What?

kickboxing? it's the sport of the future
2006-05-09 : 10:06 pm

This just occurred to me. Something happened to me this year that has never happened ever in my life. I actually started wanting a career. I just realized that before this year I always wanted "to find my place" or "figure out what I want to do" but I never really put the word "career" to it until recently.

Huh.

Now, when I make a list of the top 10 things I want to do before I die (which, of course, includes #7: Own a canopy bed and #3: Go to Wimbledon) I find that competing for the #1 spot (with: Be the one to scream "LIVE FROM NEW YORK IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT!") is: Embark upon a real, live career that I care about, and succeed in it.

When I was growing up I was certain that my place in this world was (Gloria Steinam ain't got nothin' on me) to be a mom. Just be a mom. I couldn't wait to be old enough to start poppin' 'em out and watchin' 'em grow. Mind you, I never gave a thought to money, security, even husband so much as the chillums, so it's not like my absolute goal was to find a rich guy with a good job and then "take it easy" for the rest of my life (because, you know, moms sit around and eat frozen Thin Mints all day). I just wanted to be a mom.

Um, yeah, then I entered into my 20's and realized I got PUH-LENTY of time for that crap, WAY far down that windy, blacktopped, yellow-lined road they call "Life."

I didn't, however, really have anything to replace that goal. I was just left with about 15 years before I wanted to start making that mom thing happen.

So, I forgot about it all for a while and just drifted around until one day I went on a hike with my friend Kaff and we had a 4 hour conversation about what we wanted to do with our lives. From that very afternoon on I entered into SuperCrisisJenny Mode (also known in every Human Development textbook ever written as "the Identity Crisis that occurs in Erikson's 6th Psychosocial Developmental Stage") and BOOM. The search began.

The following is a list of fields I seriously considered entering into during the span of 2 years between my convo with Kaff and my beginning classes at Emerson:

-Furniture maker
-Furniture designer
-Interior designer
-Fashion designer
-Textile designer
-Web designer
-Graphic designer
-Luthier
-Actor
-Musician
-Woodworker
-Cruise ship entertainment director
-University Hall Director
-Writer
-Lawyer
-Book editer
-Publisher
-Music editor/supervisor
-Filmmaker

Note: The above list includes ONLY those career options I explored deeply enough to warrant my buying books, looking at schools, traveling to visit schools, applying to schools (all applications complete with $50 app fee - there were several in addition to and before Emerson), finding experts and practitioners in these fields and interviewing them about their careers, and booking flights to foreign countries to check out overseas universities. These are only the options I very seriously considered.

As you can see (well, maybe you can't if you haven't been reading here long or you don't know me, but hopefully you can trust me on this one) I went with that final general option and enrolled in classes at Emerson College. After a year I'm finally settling not only on a particular field, but I'm realizing for the first time that when I finally begin work in this field, I don't want it to end just because I've started a family.

I actually, really, truly do want a career. Huh. Who'da thunk? I want to begin it. I want to work my way up. I want to be good at what I do. Really good. And not at answering phones. I want to make a name for myself in my field.

This is really weird. I mean, you'd think with all this exploration of what I want to do with my life this would have occurred to me, and I don't know what I was thinking, because once again, it's not like I've been waiting for that Anonymous Rich Dude to come along and make things all better. Not at all. Honestly? I think my head's been in the sand. It's like, I can add, really big numbers, but I've only just learned that one and one equals two.

You know, this really does follow suit. I'm really kind of a late bloomer. In so many ways. Okay, so I was wearing a B cup in the 6th grade, but there are all these little life lessons that somehow seem to catch up to me WAY later than you'd think they should have. Which is interesting, since the way I view it, my entire life's purpose (spiritually speaking, not in terms of employment) is to learn as many lessons as possible while I'm here. You know, Galileo style.

Ah, well. One of the lessons I've been working so hard to learn is that I can't live my life the way anyone else wants me to (I know, I know, everyone else was born knowing this. Ah, codependency! Like a cold Coke on a hot summer day! ::smack-ahhh!::) and, along the same lines, I am responsible for no one but myself. There's so much I can't control, so all I can do is take it one day at a time and make each decision as it is presented to me.

I can only try my best.

This, by the way, is completely apropos of nothing.

Meanwhile, here's the link again to where you can hear my final project, of which I am fairly proud.