I have always known I wanted to be a writer. Well, that’s not entirely true. As a very young child I wanted to be an artist. I can still remember standing at a child-sized easel in three-year-old preschool, covering a large sheet of paper with clumsy streaks of primary colors and imagining I was a great painter creating another wonderful masterpiece. Then I discovered the written words, and found my true love. Books! What glorious, magical things they were! And to think that I could become one of the people whose thoughts were turned into pages! To think I could be the one to bring a book to life!
In kindergarten I taught myself to spell new words so that I could write books about them. (I distinctly remember using a fairytale-themed alphabet border, which ran along the classroom wall, to teach myself “unicorn,” “dragon,” and “castle.” I couldn’t spell more ordinary things like “said” correctly, writing “sayed” instead, but, being only five years old, I felt that mythical creatures were more important that little things like verbs.) I wrote stories for every writing assignment, regardless of what that assignment was. I quickly became an expert at finding ways to connect writing prompts like “summer vacation” and “my best friend” with fictional plots. After all, the unicorn queen had to take a vacation sometime, didn’t she? And no one had said my best friend couldn’t be an imaginary friend.
So let us say that I knew I wanted to be a writer from a very early age. It’s a good thing, too. In my freshman year of college I watched many fellow students scrambling, suddenly realizing that high school was over and that they were expected to have bigger goals than being crowned prom queen. The race was on for these suddenly disenchanted young adults to decide what they wanted to do with their lives. Some had some idea, some had none at all. A few, like me, had always known.
“It must be hard,” one of these, a friend and fellow English major, said to me. “I can’t imagine it. Think about it, it isn’t like you’re just choosing a job, it’s more like you’re choosing who you are. I can’t imagine having only a year or two to make that decision.”
I confess I had never thought of things that way, but I realized she was, to an extent, quite right. In America, and I suppose in much of the rest of the modern world, a person’s career is a large part of their social identity. When two people are introduced, one of the first questions that usually arises is: “so, what do you do?” The answer, I have noticed over the years, varies depending on whether the proverbial collar around one’s metaphorical neck is blue or white. Non-professionals are more likely to keep their job and identity separate, and will respond with something like: “Oh, I work in retail.” A professional, however, will say something such as: “I am a lawyer.” Not “I work as a lawyer,” but “I am a lawyer.”
Professionals have a lot invested in their careers. Even as a mere undergraduate student I find this to be obvious. By the time a professional enters the work force, he or she has already spent a great deal of time and money pursuing his or her chosen career. The degree which states that this person has been sufficiently educated to fulfill a particular position in society represents a great commitment on the part of the professional. This is not only because of the commitment necessary to earn the degree, but because of the commitment imposed by the degree. A pediatrician cannot one day decide he would rather be dentist, or an architect, or a museum curator. It doesn’t work that way. His degree says he is a pediatrician, and he cannot change that without returning to school and obtaining another diploma. Similarly, that pediatrician fills a role in society that cannot be filled by any other professional. His friends and family– those that accept him on the first level of socialization– may know him as good ol’ Danny, who loves fishing, live theater, dogs and chocolate pound cake, but as far as the rest of the society is concerned, he is Mr. Pediatrician.
It is, perhaps, only natural that a professional’s career becomes a part of who he or she is. Such careers are purposefully chosen because, for one reason or another, the individual wanted to become a professional in that field. Nonetheless, it can sometimes be hard to balance identity, or perhaps I should say pre-career identity, with one’s profession.
In Neil Gaiman’s humorous fantasy novel, Stardust, which was later produced as a feature film, Captain Shakespeare, an infamous pirate, is revealed to be a likeable, flamboyant, and good natured cross-dresser. This is extremely funny to both readers and audiences– partly because of the character’s ostentatious actions, but also largely because of the disconnection between his profession and his self-identity. Society has a particular perception of what a pirate is, and that perception does not include someone who dresses in frilly ladies’ undergarments and dances the can-can.
This example is both fictional and hilariously extreme, but it makes the point. For a professional, career and identity are inevitably connected. Forget being what you eat, you are what you do. Perhaps the only way to maintain our identity, or at least to partially reconcile who we are with who society thinks we ought to be, is to choose our professions carefully. It is not something that should be chosen on a whim, or based solely on potential income. It is something that should be based on our love for the thing, and on our personalities.
As I said, I’ve always known I wanted to be a writer. It’s a good thing, too.
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