My Path as a Career

Dreams don’t automatically come true. I don’t mean the kind of dreams you have when you dream that your mother bought you a diamond tiara and then you fly to the moon and eat a really good tuna sandwich. I mean, the kinds of dreams you have about what you will do with your career.

I remember when I was around 15, people who were my age now would say “Ah, you’ll do 1,000 things before you decided on what you want to do.” I staunchly disagreed. This would not happen to me. I would pick a career and I would stay in it for life.

When I was little, as in seven or eight, I dreamed of being a bartender or a courtesan or an author. Ok, yes, at five or six I wanted to either tend bar or be a prostitute or write books. At least somewhere in my little mind I knew that a courtesan only serviced those of wealth. It's shocking, I know. When I think about it now, I really have no idea what I was thinking, other than I’d with one career I’d see a lot of money and get to lay around a lot (literally and figuratively) in nice houses with beautiful things, and the other I’d get to serve people pretty beverages in a swanky environment and maybe get to wear a little black dress. I wanted to be an author so I could sit around with a typewriter and look really smart.

I guess I didn’t know much about dive bars and/or inner cities or the process of writing – which to be honest, I still don’t know much about inner cities except for the movies I see and the literature I read.

In my early teens I still to wanted to be a writer, but replacing bartender and courtesan was oceanographer. To this day I have no idea what an oceanographer does. These two aspirations lasted a long time – a good five years – although beyond writing in my journal and hanging out at the beach, I am not so sure what I did to further my ambition.

At some point I decided I wanted to work in the corporate world. I’d live in New York in a nice apartment, wear suits every day and drink a lot of wine in nice restaurants while I negotiated big "deals." I had zero idea what it mean to “work in the corporate world” other than I’d get to have a lot of money and maybe a cool BMW.

Do you see a common theme here? I didn’t really think about the actual work (obviously with the courtesan thing), but the environment and the clothes that went a long with it. The bottom line is that I wanted to have a lot of money and wear nice clothes. I didn’t really have an accurate picture of what it took to get there.

My first attempt to the land of corporations was to study to become an engineer (although I always took a creative writing class). Now that I’ve worked in the corporate world, I know the kind of “corporate world” I wanted back then had more a marketing/sales bent, but I went full-board on the whole mechanical engineering thing. When I got to the Z line in calculus and I said “screw this, I’ll be an architect.” Architecture was the perfect blend of art and technology and well-known ones were quite famous. I saw how hard architects worked, didn’t make much money and had a huge passion for the job, which I did not. Not to mention, very few "make it big." By the time I figured this out I was 25 and had just graduated from college with a five-year degree in architecture. So, what did I do? I started working as an administrative assistant in various businesses that were mostly run out of people’s garage. Not my cup of tea.

My first real job was in hotel management. I worked hard but I wasn’t fond of the job. I didn't like dealing with the public. I did, however get to the wear the clothes and I learned a lot about customer service (I probably would not have been a good courtesan or bartender after all). I juiced all I could out of wearing the clothes, but finally I had to admit that my “career” was going in the wrong direction.

So, I took a new path and started to work as a marketing assistant. Ok, why didn’t anyone tell me that a marketing assistant is really an administrative assistant with a nicer title? I didn’t last long. After being told that it was my job to pick up my boss’s dry cleaning, I walked.

I did a quick inventory of my skills and what I liked to do. The only constant was writing. So, how could I make money and write? Trying to write a book is something like trying to become a movie star. I didn’t even consider writing non-fiction. I wasn’t informed enough to think about freelancing for magazines. I honed in on technical writing. And that is the direction I went, once again, full-steam ahead.

I liked it. I wrote manuals. I was in the corporate environment. I was a “writer.” The company where I worked was bought by a larger company. I started writing less and less, but now I was a “manager.” I liked this. I learned more. I went to meetings. I had a cell phone. I had a “calendar.” (To this day I love saying “I have to check my calendar.”) This was it. I had found my career.

Then, I started to get bored.

Remember the 15-year old who staunchly disagreed with having more than one career? Let’s review. In this little piece alone I’ve stated I’ve entertained the idea of bartender, courtesan, author, oceanographer, engineer, administrative assistant, hotel manager, marketing assistant, technical writer and manager.

In my late 30s I find I’m taking inventory - again. But the questions have a new flavor. What is the most important to me? What skills do I have? How much money do I need to live? My days as a corporate manager are coming to an end. And I’m beginning the next phase of my ever-elusive “career”. Writing is still a constant, but I can pretty much tell you that what I wear to work is not on the top of my list.