Do What You Love

I am on a quest for clarity this year.

Clarity of mind and emotions. Clarity of vision, and clarity of action. I want to do what I love this year. Small problem, finding out what it is I love, then making that real. I see people finding their lives in places that seem like the right place for them, and I can see some connection that brought them there. It is their belief system become manifest in the outside world, but this is not the same thing as doing what you love.

When my children were little, I loved being with them and being their mom. I did, I loved it. This doesn’t mean that I was never tired, out of control or at wit’s end. Those all go along with being a parent. But what this meant was that all I had to do (most of the time) was look into their bright eyes and round faces and I was filled with an energy and joy that kept me going, day in, day out. Day in, day out, through diapers, through food all over the kitchen, through skinned knees, bruised hearts and having them find out about poverty, classism, racism and war.

I don’t get to do that any more. It’s just not my life. The hour glass of time has run out on my being the mom to little children. Of course I’m still a mom, and blessed as a grandmother (Bubbe) also. But my day to day life is not ebbed up by inquisitive little eyes and imaginative minds. As I’m transitioning to work as a full time therapist, my day job at a university is full of trying to solve very simple problems for grown-ups who don’t want to take responsibility, mostly. These grown ups have lost their inquisitiveness and joie de vivre and instead take pride in their over-developed intellect. They don’t make me happy, and just being a helper to grown ups in this way is making me feel small inside. I guess for a large part of my day, I’m not doing what I love.

When I first had to find a full time job, I was still trying to figure out what I loved and what I could do to make money to support my children. I had no career counseling and I worked in sales and marketing. First, I marketed and sold conference space, and this was fun and amazing, creating marketing plans and meeting people from all over the world. After a while though, this got boring. Then I thought I’d like to sell property, and got licensed as a real-estate agent. This was not sitting in a nice office selling space and services and meeting well dressed professional people, this was selling run down houses to young people and big overpriced houses to bickering couples. This I realized very quickly: I not only did not love being a realtor, I hated it.

Next I tried selling furniture, realizing that I liked sales because you get to meet lots of people, but this occupation had the motive of selling people something tangible, and that gets tricky. People always think that they want something, but that something, that tangible thing, doesn’t really make them happy. As much as our culture touts the fun of shopping, furniture shopping is not so much fun for most people. I saw couples at their worst, and I was not there to do couples therapy.

I knew I had to get out when a person came up to me at a high school conference and took it upon herself to tell me how much she hated the sofa that she and her husband had decided upon and purchased from me. Parenting teenagers was hard enough without this sort of intrusion of my work life into my personal life. This also, was not doing what I loved. When would I figure out what I loved as much as I loved being at the beach with my babies? Hot summer days when all I had to do was bring out the juice boxes and peanut butter sandwiches and I rocked the world. So, I went back to school.

In my evenings now I’m a therapist, it was the career I set out for when I realized that I needed something to do with my time not spent being a mom any more. People told me, “Do what you love.” What I knew I loved I could no longer do, so how do you know what you’ll love doing, when you don’t really get to do it, but train to do it? I knew I loved talking with people, and being present, really present, something that is difficult in most day to day jobs. I also knew I loved finding out how people ‘work.’ This drives my passion for neuroscience and my curiosity about peoples’ schemas and lives.

This is what I’m selling now, I’m selling my expertise in helping people become happier, in helping people manipulate the intangible aspects of their lives so that they can manifest and grow their dreams and live a life they love. In this there is no buyer’s remorse and no dented coffee tables. I’m shifting my life so that my night gig becomes my day gig, and my evenings will belong to me, and my weekends will belong to my children and grandchildren. Clarity of purpose will bring me there.