One is the Boring-est Number
Project 365, Day 96/365
If you weren’t a writer, if you weren’t a designer, what else would you be?” Charles asked me this the other night as we waited to pick up some food we ordered. “Honestly, I’m not sure, probably something to do with food. But I don’t want to work at a restaurant, and I don’t want to have to show up anywhere physically every day like a bakery, so I guess…I don’t know.” I could tell he had been twirling the question around his own mind, and when he realized he was stumped, he came to me to see if I could jostle something loose. I sadly didn’t help him very much.
While I didn’t think more about the question that night, it did pop into my head again today. At first, it bugged me that I didn’t know. I tried to squeeze my brain the way you squeeze an old slightly dried-up lime…but there was no juice. The truth I found was that, if I wasn’t a writer (well…a marketing professional, technically if we’re talking trade), I’d be a designer. And if I wasn’t a designer, I’d be a writer. And while I do technically classify myself as both, I don’t actually make any money doing either. Not yet, at least. How Charles saw me in his mind, the roles of writer and designer, those were my “if you could do anything else” moves. And that was comforting to me.
I say that because for so long, decades really, I never quite felt good enough at what I did to feel a passion for it. I was a magazine editor that always felt a little underqualified. I’d look around at the other people in my field, and I could see my shortcomings through their strengths. Eventually, I did get good at it, or I got good at playing the “role” of an editor if my changing titles and pay increases had anything to say about it. But I always felt just a little bit like I didn’t belong. Just a little bit on the outside, all the time. This is a common thread in my life, and if you’ve been reading my posts for a while now, you probably recognize that to be true. More on that another time.
Once I felt like I had squeezed everything out of the editorial world that I could muster (lots of squeezing metaphors today, huh?), I moved into marketing, and while I gave myself the grace to learn and adjust, I know firmly that I will never see myself as a “marketer” the way I did an “editor.” Often, when someone asks me what I do for a living, I stumble. “Uh…I, uh, work for a furniture company in the marketing department.” Sometimes, I shorten it and say “I work in marketing,” but the words feel awfully foreign leaving my lips. Possibly because I spent 12 years answering that question very differently, and I’m just not used to it yet. It’s similar to how when Charles and I got married, hearing myself call him my husband felt as if I was listening to Greek come out of my mouth. Or I was possibly an actress playing the role of a very adult married woman. I won’t lie, it still feels weird sometimes…it’s been three years.
This post is not, however, about an existential crisis with my career. Nah. But more that, for the first time in a long time, I think I could actually see myself writing, for a profession…again. It’s like I took a road trip (the road trip…of life), only looked to the right the whole time, and thought “meh, the scenery was just okay.” All the while, having zero idea that while I was staring at billboards of pawnshops and citrus fruit stands to my right, all of nature was to my left. Same road…different view, if only I had turned my head. I was a design writer, but really, I just wanted to be a writer who also maybe put some pretty rooms together, never the two shall meet. But because I couldn’t really pick between the two of those, I got off at the nearest exit.
Why do we convince ourselves that we have to do or be one thing, hm? Those of us who went on to university were told to pick a major…one major. Of course, there were the elite overachievers who double majored, but let’s not discuss them now, because it doesn’t back up my analogy here. God save my analogy. So, we are told, pick a major, and then we’re told to pick a minor. Me? Journalism…and French. The thought of elevating one thing and putting that on a pedestal is engrained in us from the beginning. Psssh, that minor? That’s nothing. Just a way to get out your jollies in something that really won’t matter that much. I mean, what was I going to be? A professional French person? Ridiculous. No, I was going to be a magazine editor, and it would be my whole identity, of course.
That is, until, well…I already told you that story.
Writing this makes me realize that I need to be better at holding space for multiple things in my mind. We are allowed to have multiple passions. We are allowed to be a Jack of some trades, master of some. I don’t like the idea that if you’re two things or three or four, you’re somehow not serious about any. I want to live a life where I followed my curiosities, even if that means things are in constant flux. I’m a hummingbird who understood that we all needed to be jackhammers, so it was hard to let myself be happy flapping and fluttering between all the foliage, instead of hammering away at the same…rock? is that what jackhammers do?…for my whole life. Letting those wings loose is hard…I’m still working on it, but as soon as they’re free, it’s the skies for me. 🙂
See you tomorrow, FOAS.