What To Be When I Grow Up

I never wanted a real job.

“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” — Zig Ziglar

“Women have been told so many times to be selfless that it can actually feel uncomfortable when we attempt to search for one.” – Sue Monk Kidd

I’ve never had a real job. Never worked in the corporate domain. I haven’t worked myself up any ladders nor really known what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’ve been a lonely model in London, a black-clad nanny in Greenwich village, an executive assistant booking travel from a house by the river in Pennsylvania. I was a very short-lived waitress in the East Village and a passionate freelance writer in Chinatown. I’ve been a private chef in a town of orange groves and a student of Peruvian shamanism. I’m the only woman in my lineage to have ever graduated from university (as far as I can tell) and yet my Bachelor of Arts degree has only ever come in handy for writing books, poems and essays like this, which deep down, let’s be honest, was always the goal.

Sometimes I look at other people and think, wow, you’ve really been on that one track for quite some time. You really know yourself. My twenties were devoted to self-expression and romance, my thirties to fertility and family. I am not a nurse or an architect or a marketing consultant. I’ve been privileged to have been fed, housed and clothed during the last two decades whilst remaining unrelentingly committed the architecture of my soul. It’s not a secure job with benefits and a 401K but it has allowed me a freedom I think I’d prefer. The truth is I haven’t found anything more worthy of pursuit than this drawing forth from the deepest reaches of myself. It might seem to my small voices that I haven’t been working, at least not at a “real job” but in response, I tell them that in fact I’ve been working on something far more impactful, though much less visible.