What I'm Doing Now Instead

Here's a list of things I at some point wanted to become when I grew up:

1.  An astronaut (long hours mooning over Hubble Telescope pictures as a child)
2.  A marine biologist (this lasted all of five seconds - mainly, I was fascinated by whales)
3.  A Broadway actress (I actually put this down as my future career on a 9th grade questionnaire)
4.  A jazz singer (I can't carry a tune in a bucket and I refuse karaoke, but I still think about this sometimes)
5.  A kayaker (Sea kayaking or whitewater; I enjoy them both)
6.  A sailor (the merchant marine?  regatta?  I was never entirely clear on this point; I just wanted to work the boat myself and sail off towards the horizon)
7.  A medicine woman (still have several books on alternative pharmacology lying around somewhere)

Ages ago, as some people know, on a bit of a lark I signed up to interview for a summer job at Goldman Sachs (this is when I was in college).  I wasn't the least bit interested in investment banking, in fact, I didn't even know what investment banking was (really, I'm not joking about this).  One of the interviewers (there were two) asked me: What would you do if there was no such thing as finance?

This was the only question for which I was prepared. 

"There was this guy I met in Italy once who worked as a whitewater kayaking instructor in New Zealand during the summers and a canyoneering guide in the winters at Lake Garda.  I'd like his job."

Both of the interviewers cracked up.  A few days later, I got a call inviting me to a second-round interview in NYC.  I really think that was on the strength of this particular answer.

I've always maintained a rich and varied list of alternative careers: politician, policy analyst, developmental economist, magazine columnist, fiction author, play director, etc...people who meet me often think I was a very studious kid, which is true but only up to a point.  Someone signed my middle school yearbook, "I'll always remember you as that kid who was always reading something...usually not the assigned stuff."

By and large, I was lucky to go to very progressive gifted schools on the East Coast, where teachers felt like it was their job to engage students, rather than students' job to blindly respect authority.  In general, the attitude was often, "Ms. Gupta, it's nice of you to finally join us" but people put up with my quirks and my unwillingness to pay attention to things that didn't immediately interest me.  I think my teenage years were basically one long intellectual daydream studded with random adventures.

Like the time I randomly decided to join a political protest.  This wasn't entirely random - it was after the military actions in Afghanistan began but shortly before Bush declared war on Iraq.  I had pretty clear negative views about a possible war in Iraq, and one day when a friend told me she was headed to a protest, I went along.  It was a student protest through several miles of Washington DC, in pouring rain.  It was my first experience with collective action and possible arrest, and it was all pretty damn exciting even though, a few days later, Bush still declared war on Iraq.

In a recent blog post, Elizabeth Bachner writes "When I was younger than that, small and fifteen, I used to be an anti-vivisection activist, an anti-war activist, an activist in general, and I’m not quite sure what I’m doing now instead."

I really sympathize with Liz's point, especially that line about "what I'm doing now instead."  I remember that when the Occupy Wall Street protests broke out, I had absolutely no desire to join the cause.  This led to some internal wrangling about whether or not I'd become some uncaring figure of the establishment, and also whether or not I'd lost all human sympathy, etc, after all, there are people in America who don't have jobs.  Which sucks, honestly.  And very few people would argue that income inequality is good for a society, anyway, so the protestors had a point there.  (I mean, there's no reason that opposing a war and supporting the 99% should go hand in hand, ideologically, but my point is more about the general attractiveness of "resistance.")

Anyway, I suffered for a long time because I felt like I HAD to decide on one future career and adopt all the personality traits of that particular profession.  This job would be "The One" and I would do it every day until I died, and then as now the thought of committing to anything forever gave me hives.  I was constantly itching to be off somewhere, anywhere, really.

I realize now though that my fears weren't really about becoming "established" or "committed" per se, but more a desperate fear of becoming personally or professionally static, of getting bored of myself.  This fear propelled me to leave a good job in DC and move to India, and later from one very difficult newspaper job to another difficult magazine one here in Delhi.  To some people these rapid changes may seem indecisive and flighty, but I have absolutely no regrets.

I wish I could say that all this makes me somehow unique, but it doesn't.  Most of the people I know and am friends with share that same fear, although we may express it in different ways.  Everyone wants to grow and evolve, with the exception of the very immature, and it's natural to seek out those kinds of opportunites.  Opportunities to do things that really make you stretch (we all have different definitions, of course, of what "stretch" means).  And just because we cared about something deeply once doesn't mean we won't care about things again, or that we've somehow become inferior versions of ourselves.  (And my friend who went to the protest with me is now a litigator who earns good money helping financial corporations sue each other, so...)

Recently, I find that I want to commit to things more deeply - careers, places, etc - in order to see bigger and better results.  In one of my teenage diaries, I remember writing, "The worst thing I can imagine is turning out ordinary."  I don't know how I defined "ordinary" in those days but my picture of it looked a little like the life of the central couple in Revolutionary Road.  But what I missed in the movie is that the horrible thing about their lives wasn't that they lived in the suburbs and had steady jobs and small children.  It was what Yates himself describes as their "lust for conformity."  Conformity is very attractive, particulary the type of conformity I've observed among certain high-echelon people whom I've met recently.  (Who all went to the same colleges, etc)  But there is a point past which enjoying the trappings of conformity becomes a knee-jerk hatred of anything that challenges the status quo.  I used to be worried about ending up on the wrong side of this divide, but I'm realizing I really don't need to worry about that.