Doctors, Lawyers, and Circus Freaks

Friday night, Roger and I went with the usual suspects to Madame Zingara’s Theatre of Dreams – kind of a small-scale Cirque du Soleil style dinner theatre. It was truly mesmerizing, but as the cast of the show wowed us with their freakish strength and flexibility, I started thinking about my sister and I as little girls - plotting to take our ‘airplane’ act (you know, where one person ‘flies’ on the other person’s feet) and run away with the circus. Now, I don’t want to brag or anything, but we were pretty good. Who knows where we might be had we continued to develop the routine? We could be touring with Madame Zingara’s Theatre of Dreams!

Okay, so maybe I don’t really want to be a circus freak, but I left that night with a gnawing feeling of envy in my stomach. It’s not that I want to be a circus performer, but I want to be…something. At least Madame Zingara's cast members have a skill, a specialization. When they move to a new town and need a job, they know exactly where to go. The circus. They are circus performers.

But what about me? What am I? I’m smart, sure, but I don't really have a skill or a specialization. I’m not a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher. I never learned a trade like hair dressing or fixing cars. I’m not an expert at anything. I suppose you could say I was an expert at school, but after sixteen years, what do I actually have to show for it? At this very moment my hard-earned liberal arts degree is beautifully framed and stashed in my mom’s attic. Collecting dust. Not that it was doing much better on my wall when I lived in Atlanta. There it hung, mocking the fact that my career in real-estate was completely non-dependent on my fancy-pants education.

Who cares though, right? I mean, everybody knows that it doesn’t really matter where you go to school, just as long as you go – a fact I ignored when I took out the huge student loans to go to Vanderbilt. Of course, everyone also said it didn’t matter what you major in, just as long as you graduate. Now, this advice I took to heart. I didn’t worry about the fact that I had no clue what I wanted to do after graduation; I figured it would fall into place eventually. But the thing is, it hasn’t. And sometimes I wonder if it’s because I never actually came to a decision regarding What I Want to Be When I Grow Up. I came up with a lot of ideas, but I certainly never gave my final answer. As a little girl I wanted to be a farmer…then a movie star…then a veterinarian…

By the time I was accepted to college, I had decided to be a doctor. But the course manual was overflowing with classes like “Rhetoric of the Mass Media,” “Beethoven to the Beetles,” “Images of Women,” and “Gender Trouble.” How could I waste my time in Molecular Biology when these pressing topics were beckoning me to their cause? So four years later, my mom proudly watched me graduate cum laude with a degree in Communications. And stop rolling your eyes, because my major was not a joke, and my classes were anything but fluff (okay, I’ll give you the History of Magic and Witchcraft). But I did it. I succeeded. I can communicate. With honors nonetheless.

But what was the point? It’s not that I regret my one hundred and twenty-four university credits, but I’ve long since realized that they have absolutely nothing to do with my current situation.

Here I am, nearly thirty (okay, nearly twenty-nine, but close enough) and I still don’t know what I’m doing with my life. Maybe I’m putting too much pressure on myself, but it seems like most of my friends have figured it out by now...so why haven’t I? It’s ironic, I guess. Most women spend their twenties agonizing over if and when they will fall in love and get married. They go on dates, get into relationships then break up, only to start all over again, back at square one.

For me, the love and marriage part came easy, but I’ve spent the better part of the last decade flirting with careers. I go on job interviews, start a career then change my mind (or leave town!), only to start all over again, back at square one. Just look at my track record. First I was a magazine intern, then a bartender, then an investor relations coordinator, a financial consultant, a peanut-butter factory worker (!), a waitress, a temp, a real-estate agent, a copywriter…

Ah yes, which brings me to my current status. Writer. Or copywriter, to be exact. Part-time. ‘Freelance.’ I enjoy it, sure, but do I have what it takes to do this full-time? For clients not related to me? After a year of testing the waters at my brother-in-law’s ad agency, I should feel confident in that fact, right? And yet…I still don’t feel like an expert. I’m paralyzed with self-doubt. I just wish I had a skill that could be quantified and contained. Why couldn’t I have been a mathematician? Or a farmer? You either solve the equation or you don’t. Your crops grow or they don’t. At the end of the day, you have verifiable proof of whether or not you’re any good at your chosen profession.

But alas, I am not a mathematician or a farmer. I’m not a doctor or a lawyer or a circus freak either. And although I’m not yet thirty (or even twenty-nine), it still feels a bit late to go to med school or start working on the ‘airplane’ routine again (unless you’re up for it, D!). So what can I do?

Well, for starters, I need to stop wallowing in the could haves and should haves. I need to focus on what I am good at, then figure out how to make the most of it. And I seem to be pretty good at writing. (Check out that confidence) Maybe it’s okay that I still haven’t figured out exactly how to turn that skill into a successful career. After all, with the ever-increasing average human lifespan and the inevitable failure of Social Security, I’ll probably have to work until I’m eighty, so I certainly don’t want to choose a career lightly. Or commit to something too soon. I’ve got the next fifty years to become an expert on something…no need to hurry the process, right?