The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Career Path

It's possible that I'm overthinking it.

The job thing. The career. What am I meant to do? They say (and by 'they', I mean, the voices without faces) that everyone is meant to do something, that each of us has a 'calling', a purpose of some kind. Here I am in my mid-late thirties and I don't know what mine is. I'm not even close to knowing. Nothing is jumping out at me and saying 'umm, hello? Yes, I'm your purpose, right here! You've been ignoring me for ages but now that I have your attention, pick me dammit! Seriously! What else are you going to do with your life?'. Oh, there are my top interests of course, but each of them feel remote and unattainable. I am terrified of settling down with a job I don't care about simply because it pays the bills, just as much as I am afraid to find out that what I really want to do will require years of training and education which I cannot afford or have the endurance to complete. What exactly is the hold up here?

So, I took a career quiz as suggested by my employment counsellor. She told me to be completely honest, that if I like handling food or sweeping floors to make certain I indicate as much. There is nothing to be gained by lying to yourself. Being honest is the only way you're going to make the right decision. This is YOUR life. You need to do what feels right. Oh, I know she's right, and frankly, she looks and sounds likes someone who has it all together. When I told her that I need a job soon, that I need money to keep my family afloat, she smiled, nodded her head and said 'Yes, that is obviously the priority, but don't jump at the first opportunity that comes along just because it's there. Everyone has the right to go to work feeling excited to be there. There should be a bounce in your step.'

So, I signed up for a seminar on health care job opportunities tomorrow. She's going to be speaking at it, told me that it would be a good move on my part to go. The government keeps tabs on people who make an effort to get the information, she'd said, and if I ever applied for a government job, my involvement in the courses they offer would tell them that I am a serious candidate. I decided that going might actually be a smart thing, given that I am interested in counselling which falls in the area of mental health, but I suspect that I'll be leaning toward medical transcription or administration which is quicker to learn and more accessible to me at this point. Do I care? Do I want to do it? Well, it certainly beats retail, and from what my counsellor said, retail is taking a major hit these days. Because so many jobs in my city are private sector, we are apparently insulated from the economic crash (a surprising fact to me, since I assumed my chances of finding something were slimmer than if I had still been living in the big city). After thirteen years of standing on my feet, fielding complaints from unreasonable people, processing shipment in my managerial clothes, constantly being hounded to get things moving faster, to achieve higher sales, and being disillusioned as to why any of it should matter to me on a personal level, given that I got very little reward from it (aside from a paltry paycheck), I am ready for something that feels meaningful. All those big corporate monsters, each one using the exact same strategy to hold on to decent people (intimidation, kiss and kick delivery, dangling bonuses before hungry employees), do not care about the people they employ. It is not a secret, but they're becoming less and less concerned about pretending otherwise. What they want is profit, and every suit in a boardroom who makes far too much money for what they actually do is completely unbothered by the sweat and blood of the people they delegate to. I signed on for all of that once, missed important family gatherings, disrupted holidays, worked on my feet in my ninth month of pregnancy, worked until three in the morning putting out product on Father's Day, worked twelve to fourteen hour days out of a sense of loyalty without being compensated for it, and at the end of it all, I was deemed redundant and every sacrifice I made was discounted when they decided to let me go. Is it different anywhere else? No, not in the retail world, and if you're a high school kid who makes after school appearances or a grandma who works so that you won't be stuck at home, this may not matter to you. It's when you're trying to pay for a home, when you're a mother with a small child who needs things, who wants things, when you have a car payment and a tooth which needs fixing that being treated with respect and dignity, as well as being paid in accordance with your performance, is important to you. There's all of that and then there's the moral dilemma of knowingly selling merchandise which is not only poorly made on foreign soil, but it is also mostly unnecessary. Selling always feels cheap to me, particularly when all the salesperson is trying to do is meet their quota. What happened to knowing your product? What happened to people actually knowing what they are talking about?

How did I get here?

So, after taking the quiz, here are some of the jobs which I'm apparently suited for:

Career Coach
Psychologist
Bereavement Counsellor
Archivist
Political Aide
Historian
Health Records Professional
Sociologist
Researcher
Criminologist
Epidemiologist
Medical Transcriptionist
Public Policy Analyst
Writer
Marriage and Family Therapist
Medical Secretary
Library Technician
Gerontologist
Community Worker
Administrative Assistant
Religious Worker (ha!)
Adult Education Teacher
Professor

Not a customer service/retail manager in the bunch. And, I did it for thirteen years.

I want to say it wasn't a waste of time, but I'm feeling kind of negative at the moment.

The thing is, nearly every one of these careers is appealing to me, but most of them require more education and that frightens me. My government currently has a program which provides tuition and monetary support for the duration of the education of laid off employees for up to $28000 a year, and you don't have to pay it back. It seems too good to be true, but as I checked and double-checked this with my counsellor (who is also free), it turns out that this is indeed the way it works. It is tempting, the idea of going back to school and not having to pay for it, but shouldn't I be making money right now? Shouldn't I be in a situation where if my daughter wants or needs something that I won't have to think twice about it before buying it? While it would be lovely to just go back to school, a part of me would feel like I'm doing something wrong by not bringing in enough money to live comfortably. Will M. support the idea? Will it frustrate him?

Argh. Just...sigh.

I just feel like the decisions should come easier.