When I was a child, I wanted to be a marine biologist. I didn’t know the ins and outs of the job, or what it entailed but I knew that I loved the ocean and that sharks and dolphins fascinated me.
During my first encounter with career choices, the second-grade career puppet show, it came to my attention that the world will allot you what it deems fit and necessary for its own performance. There were no marine biologist puppets. I was coerced into choosing the astronaut because it was the closest fit.
For five minutes I kept my hand elevated in the sleeve of an astronaut telling a room full of people why I wanted to be something that I didn’t. It felt like a fabricated oath, but I made the most of it because while I described the exploration, the undiscovered life, and the equipment needed for the lack of oxygen in outer space, I thought of how that applied to marine biology and how lucky I was that I didn’t have to convince them I wanted to be a garbage person, though I respected their work.
In the fourth grade I learned what the word entrepreneur meant and knew that regardless of what I did, I wanted to be one of those. I didn’t much enjoy when people told me what to do, or what I could be, and so blazing a trail seemed like the most appropriate path.
The very next year in school, I won what they called the Dreamer and Doer Award, which for me, meant I was given permission to do what it was that I could dream up. The final round of the award process was an essay submission. They chose mine and, in that moment, I reflected on my grade school career thinking, ‘oh, of course, I’m a writer.’ For the entirety of my first six years in school, I put words on a page and people responded to them. From extracurricular short stories, to picture books, to travel journals from visits to my grandparents, I created narratives and wrote about experiences and people read and listened to my words. It’s how I connected.
I also had a speech impediment. I spent two to four hours every week in the speech therapist’s office trying to learn how to say, “Sally sold seashells by the seashore,” and how to pronounce “teeth” rather than “teef.” Then on Thursdays I’d wait by myself at the bus loop to be shipped off to gifted classes at another school because I was the only kid that got deemed as such at my own. I sobbed the first day because it made me feel different and disconnected. It was on those rides that I’d write the story of Super Bacon Man so that I’d have something to share with my primary class when I returned.
Books, it was always books, that made something in my young essence feel less alone and less different. Then as the years began to pass, my voice began to take shape, and my pronunciations began polishing, it became stories. My recognition of social cues endowed me with the courage to share stories, the kind you tell out loud in class to get laughs from anyone who will listen.
After the jokes wore off, it came to my attention in the shaded hallways of high school that people tend to crave words that unveil the pieces of their soul that they’ve lost touch with. The books that became stories then turned into words. The kind that you write in notes for those having harder days and then share on stages in front of hundreds and then thousands to encourage people that what they’re looking for is out there if they remain open to it, otherwise they run the risk of getting silenced. I fell silent.
“You’re a beautiful writer, but if you pursue a career in it, you’ll resent it,” said one voice.
“Your writing is great, but you’ll need to find work that will pay the bills,” said another.
“I support you, and have no doubt that you’ll make it, but you need to give yourself options.”
Options. I do also like science, I thought, as I crossed the street from the School of Journalism to Health and Human Performance. I studied and aced most of the classes in my physiology degree then spent my spare hours in a local coffee shop writing a novel. The synopsis of it: we all want connection. We all just want to be seen and known through the labels.
Grad school. Another opportunity at making a career out of writing. I filled out an application to an MFA program in creative writing and never submitted it. I had no portfolio except an unedited novel that just a few friends read. I didn’t take a single English class in undergrad because I got all the college credits I needed in high school and was trying to save money. On paper I was lined up for physical therapy school, a way for people to connect with their own bodies.
A school in Scotland came to my attention. I can sit in a room and learn to write or go live life and have something to write about, I told myself. My student visa came in the mail a month later.
Six months after that I sat on a bridge in Fort William, Scotland terrified I had made a terrible mistake, that I had made all the wrong choices. I was a week into my first rotation, and I felt like the boy with his arm up the tail end of an astronaut pretending to be something the world had a place for.
“Walk it out in your head,” my sister said on the other end of the phone. “If you decide to drop out of school and move back, what’s your next step?”
“I can apply to writing programs,” I said.
“Can’t you do that while you’re there?”
“I can, but this isn’t who I am,” I said. “I don’t want to be known as the Physical Therapist, I’m a writer.”
“Then write,” she said. “You ultimately get to decide what you want to do next, but my advice to you would be to think about this and write it out. Map out what the future would look like for you with either decision, but I will say, you’re not missing anything here.”
Following her advice, I wrote in the brown leather journal she had given me before I moved away. It reconnected me with myself and both of us decided to stay. Resting on the floor of my rented bedroom, I surrendered control and trusted that the same universe that gave me a passion for the world’s slowest art form also had a reason for bringing me to a foreign country in pursuit of a career in something else. Then in my journal I wrote, I’m in the world’s best creative writing program. It became my mantra.
Settling into the idea of living in Scotland, a few months later — as one does — I found myself walking through a graveyard in Edinburgh. Wandering through and reading the old tombstones with a friend, I noticed how on most of the carved rocks the occupations of the deceased were written above their names.
“That would be awful,” I said. “Why would anyone want to be remembered for what their job was?”
“I know, right? I think to some regard, during that era, jobs became a source for identity. They became the purpose for something greater,” my friend said.
“Hm, I’m not sure much has changed,” I said.
Purpose. I turned the word over in my mind a few times looking at the names on the tombstones. Maybe those people were right. Purpose tends to be something that we focus on for the future or even in the moment. We stumble over what our purpose will be, what we will use our time for, but maybe we have it backwards. Maybe purpose is a notion similar to legacy, something we look back on, but more personal. We don’t get to decide what we are remembered for by other people, but I think that we’re given the chance to give meaning to the things we do and the things that happen to us during our time here. We get to own the purpose of our individual life events, choices, and the things that we elect to do with our time, our work. We get to decide our purpose.
It’s been five years since I stood in that graveyard, and I’ve had a collection of jobs since then, some of which I was paid for and others I was not. The beautiful thing about them all, is that together they’ve allowed me to go after my true life’s purpose: connection — making people feel less alone in their struggles and more in tune with their inner self and their potential. Whether they helped me steer to a different place or job in general, each piece of work has helped me move forward toward where I hope to be.
Just as we use our personalities to create what our souls, or beings, yearn for, we use our work as the medium for our purpose. In that way, it becomes the act we do that allows us to feel most aligned with what our stories bring to the world.
It took me a long time to recognize this, but as a child much of what made me feel different and isolated from everyone else were also the things that made my story extraordinary, and worth sharing. For a long time, I tried to suppress who I was because I didn’t enjoy the feeling of being left out and separate. I didn’t enjoy sitting alone in a room with a speech therapist or on a bus to another school while all my friends got to stay, so I made my best attempt at connecting and expressing myself through writing. I didn’t want anyone else to feel the way that I did in those moments, I wanted everyone to feel connected. I was starting the work then.
Writing is still the medium I choose to use to connect with others and with myself. It’s the art form that I vibrate with on an energetic level, where I find my flow state. It has taken me to incredible places and allowed me to have beautiful conversations and connections with people through stories that I’ve gotten to listen to and share. It’s what centers me and makes me feel the most human, but it’s not the only thing that I consider to be work, nor is the writing itself what I consider to be my purpose. What writing has done is given me the feeling of alignment so that I am able to navigate what acts and jobs best fit in with my true work, the story I want to share with the world.
When it comes to the proverbial career day puppet show, I still don’t know that there’s one I can slide my hand into and raise up honestly, but I hope that to be the case for everyone. My hope is that people, you, are remembered for the work title that is your name, and all that it encompasses. While the services that our work provides is great, what’s even better is the story and the purpose created behind the work, because that, in my opinion, is what’s worth putting in a dash between the years of birth and the beginning of legacy.