find what it is that would make me professionally happy

I wonder if maybe this is one of those goals that I can’t work toward, one that I’ll only know I’ve achieved it once I’ve actually achieved it. So far, nothing has made me professionally happy. I’ve never worked at a place I’ve loved, never done something about which I was truly passionate.

In my wildest dreams, I come up still with a coffee shop and I can imagine it so, so clearly. I can see every little thing about it, every detail is pristine. Other paths? Nothing of the same clarity, the same drive, motivation, or aptitude.

Working in an ed reform non-profit, though, has been considerably eye-opening. What I’ve learned is that in truth, I honestly believe I could do incredible things in the classroom so long as I have a little freedom and a lot of patience. If I can take everything that comes from the top-from Federal and State DOEs, from the District, and from organizations like the one I work for-and filter it so that the important bits drive what I do and the unimportant bits become merely background noise, I think I could actually be quite happy, inspired.

I honestly need something to hold me over until I earn a license and get a teaching job, which may take longer than I imagine, but this is where the fear creeps in. How do I do something else, something so much less, when I’m starting to really see where I do belong? What is out there that could keep me motivated in the meantime?

...’elp.

It’s been 4 weeks at work and while only 20 days, they’ve been 20 days full of vocabulary I just can’t get next to. It’s a classic conundrum in my life…do I get as close as I can right now to what I want even if it’s a little off or do I do something completely different, getting experiences along the way?

There’s no use in wondering what comes next when you’re not even out of your probation period, but as you know, it comes naturally to me.

In hearing what I do each weekday about benchmarks, standards, districts, superintendents, etc, I realize that this isn’t where I’m best utilized, perhaps. I like where I am and many of the people I work with and I’m sticking it out at least for the two years they ask me to, but as I do so, I’d like to research a few things.

Yes, I’m still thinking seriously about a PhD, but editing also knocks occasionally and writing, writing is always what tugs most emphatically. A little coffee shop, too, we mustn’t forget. As November gets closer, I begin to think more about this year’s Nano and as I read more of Kerouac’s journals, I think more about that world, the one I’ve only known within the ivory tower, but one that I quite desperately miss.

I wonder if I can’t find those same conversations and that same level of creative enthusiasm elsewhere. I wonder whether I’ll need to.

One thing is clear, though: when I decided long ago that I didn’t want to teach if students wouldn’t be potential colleagues, I absolutely knew what I was talking about.

There’s education and there’s the academy. And then there’s everything else.

I’ve been at work for a week and I know that for at least a month, I’ll be in a pretty heavy transition period, but through it all, I’m becoming more and more convinced that yes, going back to school may really be what it is I want to do.

It’s odd. Standing at the corner waiting for the bus, at least 50 undergrads pass me, giggling and using “like” as punctuation and subscribing to all manner of non/conformity and in those moments, I roll my eyes almost fondly, but they do indeed seem to be another species entirely. Students…dear, how it’s been a long time since I was that young.

However, while their social lives baffle me entirely, I do have a strong desire to lead them to writing brilliant papers free of pretension and full of insight. I want to learn again, to explore themes and nuances and meaning again. After all, that’s what I do and I haven’t in so, so terribly long.

I don’t mind making copies and providing support, but when the people around me have the same level of education and are talking about real Things, it makes me a little antsy. I feel like I’m losing something dear to me, like I’m losing the ability, maybe, or the wherewithal to really sink my teeth into a text. I certainly don’t think I’m better than this position; I’m thrilled to have it and I want to take advantage of the opportunity for a while (2 years is what they ask of us, so), but the more I think about it, the more I really think I could be happy in a classroom—not a lecture hall, mind you, but a classroom.

Will I always be so professionally transient? There’s really no way to know, I suppose, and there’s nothing to be able to say I’ll have money to afford going to grad school again, but I need to be closer to the literary circles, the minds, the madness. I can’t help but come back to it…I’m young, I know, but it feels like where I belong.

I’ve been something of an idiot over the past what look like 8 entire months and have proceeded to neglect 43T. I’m so sad about this, seriously. =/ However, what you’ve missed in the interim is quite a bit…I moved to Missouri for two months, for example. In addition, in Missouri, I decided to get a PhD after all. I decided that I think I might want really to be a professor, that I might be desperate to join the literary world again, that I might indeed want to become an essayist and that really, I still want a family and a coffeeshop and a stellar apartment in Boston.

For now, though, what would make me professionally happy is working for a nonprofit in Boston, one with whom I have a second interview tomorrow and one with whom I feel oddly passionate, for having only talked with them once and scoured their website.

Wish me luck, please. :D

The two most important professional goals I’ve ever had have been to establish a coffee shop and to become a legitimate writer. These things don’t change. What does, however, are the choices I’m willing to make in order to earn enough money to realize either of these goals…and, well, eat.

I wouldn’t be happy at a desk and I wouldn’t be happy doing mere office work. I need a legitimate position helping legitimate people, but unfortunately, I’m not at a place right now where I could be hired because my experience has primarily to do with academia.

That said, I’m coming to convince myself that if I start out at a horribly entry level position at a nonprofit, I’ll be able to quickly prove myself as a diligent, passionate person and will be able to move up to some more legitimate work. I am always terrified that I’ll grow comfortable in a position and find myself at 45 without having thought about my true dreams for 10 years. But anyway…this seems a doable thing for a few years, yes?

...keep in mind that I’m not saying that organizing an office and keeping things moving smoothly is somehow weak or worthless work, only that I need to be in a more interactive environment. I need to get my hands dirty, to get my mind around a problem and work it out. I need to change minds, I think. And I can’t do that from behind a computer.

It would seem obvious that while I’m trying to earn money and break into an industry that I should be doing something related to that field and keeping my eyes peeled, so to speak. In actuality, however, copyediting writing center-related articles that have everything to do with pedagogical theory and nothing to do with ideas and creativity create an instant behind-the-eyes headache and make me wonder if I really want to write at all.

This is bloody preposterous.

Instead, I need something that doesn’t positively destroy the will to be the “fantastic little wordsmith” I was so recently called. Something that inspires creativity and those swirling ideas that demand so forcefully my attention.

I know what it is I want to do, finally. I want to write book reviews, essays, commentary/analysis, and perhaps biographical sketches. I want to publish mishmashed books that combine these pursuits in delightfully literary ways. I want to be interviewed on NPR and make my interviewer laugh.

In order to do this, however, I’ll need a day job that allows me to foster these dreams and to nurture them all at once. Pursuits that are just out of the realm of what I want to do and nothing whatsoever like the things I want to do are intensely stifling, I find.

No more, kiddos.

So, bring on the humanitarian work, the working with people, the being in the industry somehow but doing anything but copyediting and copywriting.

What I think I really need to do now is to find something that pays the rent, keeps me afloat, and allows me to really start researching the New York Review of Books and figuring out how I’m going to make this work.

Because I’ve spent my whole life trying to find something that fits and now that I have, to not realize that dream would likely be one of the biggest regrets I’ll ever have.

I think about this almost every single day and while I know I want to thrive within the literary world and while I want to be part of that movement again, I wonder what it is I’d actually succeed at doing there.

I want to be an essayist, of course. I want to publish books of essays and books of criticism and books of literary analysis. This, I know for sure.

I also eventually want my coffee shop, though imagining the absence of this one doesn’t break my heart so completely as would not writing.

What this basically comes down to is that I’ve been looking for jobs in Boston for the past 6 months on and off and now that I’m ready to commit to one or three, I’m finding very few I’d want. Receptionist? Door Attendant? No, thanks.

Okay, okay, I could work as a receptionist, but so, so much do I want to be in that world again, the world of ideas, y’know? And I’m not sure what it is I need to do to get my foot in the door.

Are there relatively low-level jobs that will still pay well but will allow me to work my way up? I can’t jump in as a senior editor…not only would I not want it, I wouldn’t be qualified. So right now, what I need is a literary job that allows me to build a more literary and less academic resume, that allows me to earn money and make friends, and that basically allows me to smile while being legitimately productive.

On reserve at my local library are copies of five or six books written basically for people in just my position, but in the mean time…

Anyone have anything like that available in the Greater Boston area?

Hold the phone, kids, I think I may have thought of a legitimate career path that would keep me clothed, housed, fed, and happy. I’d been throwing it around in my general stockpile of ten or fifteen professional options, but the more I imagine what my life would be like if I pursued the idea, the more I want to be a professional literary critic. I’m reading through tons of back issues of the New Yorker and reading their reviews, I’ve got a decent grasp of dry wit, scathing sarcasm, deeply affecting idealism, and y’know, the English language, plus, I love to read and writing is sort of my thing.

So! What I need to do is develop a portfolio of reviews and I need to run at this with a sort of force I’ve never before needed to utilize.

In the meantime, however, I need to find a Summer job and I need to find a job I can work until I’m paid for my reviews in Boston or until I’m hired on as a staff writer. The job searches, needless to say, absolutely freak me out and leave me irritable and exhausted.

So it’s deep breaths and patience for the next couple of months, I suppose, but the hard part may indeed be over.

So I want to work for NPR. I also want to work for the Sesame Workshop and The Learning Channel and then I also want to curl up with a manuscript proof and a cup of coffee, offering my expert opinion. Plus? I want to write…write and write and write and go on NPR as an interviewee. I have an intense desire to work with, to help people, but an equally intense desire to appear only for interviews and readings and to live the rest of my life quietly. Obviously, I want a café.

Part of my thing is that I feel like I know absolutely nothing, that I have no marketable skills, and that I have no idea what steps I’d need to take even if I knew what I truly wanted. ...really, if given the choice, I’d write. Solely, I’d write. Essays, mostly, commentary, witty and biting sketches of family, of friendship, of travel, of the marketplace, of the academy, the worksplace, the country. I feel like I’m reasonably funny, like I have some sort of edge that appeals to a few people, but since I’ve started the Nano, I can’t figure out what it is I mean to say. Of course, then there’s always the idea that everyone writes and that no one’s really published.

I’m starting finally to understand a little better who I really want to be, I just don’t know quite yet what she does. And that! That is insanely frustrating. =/