Today’s chapter in the Checking-Out series comes from my good friend and matchmaker Clelia who finally tapped back into her childhood passions to change her path in life.
I hated the trajectory my life was on. It was just all wrong. That much I knew six months into my first job. I was working as a lawyer at a big law firm, a seemingly prestigious and high paid job that took me three very rigorous and expensive years of law school to obtain. But being a lawyer was just not right for me. I had liked law school just fine, mostly because I like school in general, but I was never overly engaged in the subject matter. I was even less enthusiastic about my law firm job – my co-workers seemed cold-hearted due to constant stress, the cases I was staffed on were uninteresting and unrelatable, and the austerity of the corporate firm environment was stifling. The best way that I can describe the way I felt about my legal career was that it was like wearing a coat that didn’t quite fit. The coat was aesthetically pleasing, expensive and others admired it, but it just did not suit me at all.
So if this trajectory is wrong, what is the right trajectory, I wondered. And can I still get on the right trajectory was my next question. The answer to at least the first question came to me about one year into my job. My mother called me one day and told me the polite version of the following: “Our house is not an f-ing storage facility, please get your massive amounts of crap out.” As a result of this directive, I returned home to the bedroom I grew up in. Somewhat of a hoarder, I have every school paper or project I ever completed sorted chronologically in boxes in the back of my closet. I pulled out these dusty boxes and inside I found pure gold from my childhood– a collection of my original poetry written in a Little Mermaid journal, a surprisingly funny cartoon series involving a chicken and his assorted animal friends, my own addition to the Berenstain Bears series (“Too Much Nintendo”!). Sitting on the floor, surrounded by piles of my youth’s work, I went from nostalgic to upset. I was so creative as a kid, what happened to that person? As a kid, when someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I always answered either a writer, a children’s book author, or a teacher or college professor so I could teach about books. Where had those aspirations gone? I think they died sometime between when my well-meaning father suggested to me that Political Science or Economics were the only “useful” majors and when my equally well-meaning mother dropped the line, “When you go to law school…” for the first time.
That moment was truly an epiphany. I realized that to put myself on the right trajectory, I needed to go back to being this person who was the truest form of myself. I thought about how glimmers of this person still exist even in my business suit when I e-mail myself ideas for kids’ books or screenplays, meticulously craft and post comments on NY Times articles, or sign up for mentor activities where I can help interns with their writing.
Now that I had an idea of what direction I wanted my life to go in, I had to figure out the next step. It took about one more year to figure that out. I dabbled with the idea of getting a Ph.D in English. I also thought about just starting over completely and getting a job as an assistant to a book editor. I briefly considered the more responsible option of transitioning my legal career from the finance industry to the creative industry. In the end, I balanced my dreams and reality and I decided I would like to go into book publishing and also teach as an adjunct professor and do some creative writing on the side. I found a master’s program in Publishing and Writing at Emerson College in Boston that trains students to enter the publishing industry and also offers undergraduate teaching opportunities and writing courses. In other words, the program was perfectly tailored to my interests. I was accepted this past March.
I have a lot of friends who are unhappy in their jobs, but when asked what they want to do they say, I just don’t know what else I would do. Having been in that situation, my advice is to look back to simpler times before Blackberries or conference calls, and figure out who you were and what you loved then. Maybe your nine-year-old self has all the answers you need.
Now, I am about two weeks away from leaving my job, moving to Boston and starting grad school for the second time around. I am in way over my head in student loans, I have no idea what the future holds for me, but what I do know is that I finally feel like I am sporting a very finely tailored, sharp-looking coat that fits just right and I am absolutely delighted to be wearing it.
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