I never properly appreciated having a guidance counselor. In fact, I can barely remember meeting the one I had in high school. Since I had good grades, I don’t suppose I was ever flagged as a student who ever needed that kind of advice and I know I was too arrogant to seek it out. I was going somewhere, dammit. I was a mover and a shaker.
Indeed, by that time, I’d already begun developing a career as a freelance writer, submitting stories and poems to online magazines and writing reviews for several online publications. I didn’t exactly get paid yet – I was happy to do the latter gig in exchange for something beneficial, nothing in particular though.
So in many ways, my career path was set well before I made any deliberate decision about what I wanted to do with my life. I became a writer because I already was one. I went to university to study English lit and write papers because that’s what I believed writers did. I choked back cheap scotch for the same reason.
In the meantime, I’d begun to make money writing, too. For my first years out of school, I worked at an online magazine and continued to write and edit other people’s writing. Then I gave up the desk job and went freelance so I could write all the time.
Several years passed and millions of words later, I am still a writer. I haven’t really been anything else. I haven’t wanted to be, either.
Until lately, that is. In my most wracked moments, I feel overcome by some combination of a two-times-three-year career-itch, a curiosity about roads not taken and a bone-deep fatigue caused by the feast-or-famine cycle familiar to anyone who’s self-employed.
Then there’s the digital age’s ongoing transformation-slash-destruction-slash-revolution of the entire media landscape but that’s not what keeps me up at night.
What keeps me up is the tangle of questions, anxieties and fantasies I have about the second career I should’ve started already. This is where a guidance counselor would come in handy. Without one, I flounder around, vulnerable to the dubious notion that establishing another career means the same as establishing a whole other personality, and who wouldn’t want to have one of those, too?
Surely I would be better off if I could only figure out how to become…
… a psychiatrist, the kind with a couch
This was an ambition of mind ever since my ten-year-old self read the three pages on “Freudian Psychoanalysis” in The Guinness Illustrated Encyclopedia of Facts, a paperback I still keep within arm’s reach of my desk just in case the Internet breaks. Perhaps Freud would know. He might have also explained my reasons for growing a beard as soon as it was remotely cool again.
Again, I don’t have the professional expertise necessary to decipher my motivations. The bottom line is that Woody Allen’s movies always made psychiatry seem like a lucrative and stimulating job. And it’s cooler than just being a medical doctor or a psychotherapist because you get to be both and I hear that you get a special discount when you buy a couch.
Really, the only downside is the patient is the one who handles the lying-down-and-yammering-about-yourself-for-50-minutes part but I believe I could bring some innovative ideas to the field in that regard.
…a teacher, though the incredibly well-paid kind
Not sure if this one exists at all. Mostly I hear horror stories about even the incredibly talented new teachers spending years and years getting bounced between short-term contracts and substitute gigs.
I prefer to imagine myself as an educator with the stentorian authority.
…a saver of babies
This category of potential employment is a bit vague. It's just that whenever I caught myself worrying too much about my work, I'd try to remind myself I'm "not saving babies," a phrase that denoted the most altruistic and humanity-enriching vocation possible. I suppose it could be a neonatal nurse or a pediatric surgeon or whoever is responsible for rescuing babies from wells should they happen to get stuck.
I really haven't given it that much thought. I hope someday to get some babies together for a baby focus group so I can get a better grasp on what they're really looking for these days.
…a spacewoman
Making mad cash money while totally up in space
Haven't really thought this one through yet.
… an elitist
Again, this might not be a viable career. I'm just looking to become extremely rich, like 18th-century-aristocrat rich, with a tiger skin coat and everything.
Short of that, I'd settle for being the next step down from a woman version Wolf of Wall Street. Lol!
…or my daughter's assistant-slash-stylist
Hanging out with her all day would be the best possible job, seeing as she's (mostly) fun and funny and has some fantastic dance moves that I'm trying to master for myself.
I know some people call it "parenting" but I've already sussed out that's a non-paid position so I'm looking for something that's better for all of us.
True, she may have to become more of a breadwinner herself maybe with an acting or modeling career and that's totally fine as long as we can avoid a Lohan-family-style situation or anything else that would get us on TV with any regularity.
Once she turns 3, I'll have a serious talk with her about our goals as a team. She might have some other ideas for me, too.