Jesus, it's so easy to see now how little that phrase says about the people we were, but at the time it was our all encompassing shared identity. We were the straight-A students. Enough said.
I think Lisa and Kristin were friends. I always thought of them as such, anyway, but I honestly don't know. I was friendly with them and sometimes sat near them in our classes together, but we weren't really friends then. I didn't know them. In fact, it's occurred to me recently that—thanks to Facebook—I know them better now than I ever did in high school—and Kristin and I aren't even friends on Facebook! But I know Kristin is an avid runner. Lisa is a deeply conscientious veterinarian, Christian, and liberal in her politics.
Really. That's more than I knew about their personal lives back in high school. But back then I presumed to assume—and worse, the teachers and administrators did—that I knew all about them, or at least that I knew enough. I won't speak for Lisa and Kristin, but I know the teachers and administrators presumed to think they knew all about me.
The only thing they didn't know, and the question that I was supposed to have the answer to, was what I wanted to be. There wasn't much discussion of my potential, because (as far as they knew), I was living up to it at the time and would continue to do so.
I was a good girl.
But my potential hung there in the air around me just the same. What did I want to do with all that potential? What did I want to BE?
I had no idea.
Actually, that's not true. I wanted to write. I can't really say that I was encouraged in this, but I was only actively discouraged once. Maybe once was enough. I don't know.
At any rate, for whatever reason, I thought (without thinking about it) that writing wasn't a good enough plan. I had to find a better one. (As an aside, this is completely in character for me. If a plan is not picture perfect, I will agonize endlessly trying to find a better one. It's crippling, because of course no choice is perfect.)
I finally settled on programming and headed off for college. I was very enthusiastic about going to college (but less so about actually doing any coursework). I puttered around at one school for a while, then transferred to another and puttered around there. Then I dropped out. Then I went back. Then I dropped out again. And then I got a contract at Microsoft and I haven't been back in a college classroom since.
In favor of a perfect plan, I stumbled my way into a career. It is not a career I would ever have purposefully pursued back when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to BE. Technical Indexer? *snort* Technical Writer? Ha! Maybe to pay the bills while I worked on my novel. And now I'm a Program Manager. I don't think I'd ever heard of being a Program Manager when I was 18.
So, this morning I'm thinking about all that potential I had. Did I live up to it? Did I?
Who the fuck cares? Seriously. Who cares? Nobody. Not even me.
What matters now, to every single person in my life, is that I am able to provide for my family, and—shockingly enough—that I am happy. Nobody cares what I do for a living except as a point of curiosity. There might be the occasional person who is impressed, just as there is certainly the occasional person who is underwhelmed, when I describe my job. Most people just nod and offer a polite but clearly disinterested response. My employment is a footnote. It's a shrug.
Do you know what people really like to hear about? They like to hear about my thoughts and opinions and ideas, and most of all they like to hear about my adventures and experiences. People like to hear my stories.
It occurs to me that instead of asking the teens in our lives what careers they want to pursue, we should ask them what stories they want to be able to tell first.
And it occurs to me, shockingly enough, that I have just figured out what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be someone who has more and more and more really good stories to tell.
where there were only walls. ~ Joseph Campbell
9 comments:
Love this! I've been sitting on a blogpost I wrote about a week ago and it has the sentence "I wanted to be a writer." You may have inspired me to post it!
I can't wait to see it, Gail!
I was just rereading my own post and got hung up on the bit that people thought I was living up to my potential because I getting As. It's actually fairly nauseating to contemplate, and yet I know that attitude prevails in every school in the world. So sad.
Very cool!
Excellent post asking some big questions. What is potential? What is identity? Thanks for connecting these thoughts and for some great writing.
I, too, was one of those straight A-living-up-to-her-potential kids who didn't know what she wanted to do (except write, as thought that *ever* needs to be said in parentheses >:[ ). I made it through college, I got a job in journalism and did well at it, I "lived up to my potential," I burned out after a decade, became a flak for a university, had a daughter and realized I didn't want to do anything else but raise her, had a son, a few years later wanted to help my husband get out of his lifestyle-disease-inducing desk job and commute, went to massage therapy school, became a therapist, discovered that while it was hard physical work it was deeply satisfying, intellectually challenging, meditative and other-directed, and was stunned to realize that I could have had a profoundly satisfying, decently paid career without ever going to a four year-college. That was when I began seeing through yet another layer of the paradigm most of us live in completely unquestioned.
Thank you for bringing up the question of potential for me to chew on and make sure I've completely seen through *that* manipulative, pressure-filled concept.
love this post. reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:
The universe is made of stories, not atoms. ~ Muriel Rukeyser
pondering... i think it's often possible to have both: stories *and* work that is more than a footnote ~ the people we work with and play with in life also have dreams and stories. if we can connect to those parts of each other, we have work and connection, and that often leads to making and sharing stories together.
and if there are parts of our work that fit things we love, in sharing those why-we-do-what-we-do aspects and stories, our work becomes more than a footnote. (for me, anyway.)
and your post is excellent ponder fodder ~ i can't seem to stop!
the concept of plans not being good enough resonates strongly for me. job interviews were intimidating for me mostly because of the often-asked question of "where do you want to be in five years?"
i had a zillion ideas of what i wanted to be and do by then and no solid plan, and no tentative plans that were "good enough" to answer that question.
it all changed when i changed the context in my head ~ i'd still hear the question as it was asked in interviews, and i still knew the usual context. in my head, i gave myself permission to change the context to what mattered to me. i didn't have a goal to be a manager at the company in 5 years, or have a degree, or make a particular salary level, or to be working at a different job and/or field. i cared that i was happy, still learning and growing, contributing good work to a company and/or project i feel good about, and working with people i mostly enjoyed being with.
when i "let" myself say those things as my 5 year goal, it released so much self-inflicted pressure and guilt about not having a "good enough" plan. and nobody has ever asked me to reframe it to be more job-specific. i like to believe that reframing it for myself reframed it for them too ~ so they could see "happy" and "learning" as valid 5 year plan goals.
(i might be delusional, but it's serving me well.)
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