In Nick Hornby’s novel High
Fidelity, record shop owner Rob, who likes making top 5 lists, writes down
his top 5 dream jobs. All but one of the
jobs (architect) are impossible, because he’s chosen things like, ‘Journalist
for Rolling Stone magazine, 1976 -1979,’
When I was a child, my dream jobs, in no particular
chronological / of importance order were:
·
Mounted police officer
I was obsessed with The Bill and with horses, so this seemed
like the perfect combination.
·
Film / music journalist
Because then I would get to meet rock stars and actors. I
was too young to know that rock stars and actors hate journalists.
·
Band photographer
Because of the mighty Jill Furmanovsky and her beautiful
black and white photographs of rock stars.
·
Criminal psychologist
Because of Robbie Coltrane in Cracker and my enduring love for anything police procedural that
had the added bonus of being grim and made you want to check all your doors and
windows were locked before you went to bed.
·
A writer
Miss Joan Wilder, on her yacht, with her typewriter in Romancing the Stone. I already loved
stories, I loved writing stories, I loved stories about writers, I loved the
words WRITING and BOOK. Yesterday, I saw this family walking along the high
street. Mum, dad, son. The son was trailing a few feet behind, and he was
reading as he walked along. That was me. I LOVE it when I see kids reading in
weird places; during meals in cafés, in the supermarket, outside shops. Any
opportunity to read, and I’d read. I always had a book with me (and mostly still
do, because they have in handy when you’re queuing or stopping for coffee, or
on a long boring public transport journey, or can’t sleep, or you’re bored, or
it’s too wet to go out….I draw the line at reading at the gym, though.)
For years, writing was my thing. It was my calling. I knew
I’d never be happy if I did anything else. I worked in a series of undemanding
jobs that meant I could write during quiet periods (night reception cover was
brilliant for this, as all you had to do was keep one eye on the door and set
the early morning wake-up calls.)
I told myself each job was just a way to make money while I
was writing. Then I stopped. What I wrote was shit. I didn’t have any stories.
I didn’t have any of my own ideas, I didn’t have any of my own characters. This
was in the chick-lit boom of the late 90s / early 00s, when Bridget Jones set a
precedent for the genre, and many pale imitations followed.
I was trying that sort of writing; girls going on
adventures, bitchy bosses, selfish flatmates, bad boyfriends, white wine, Jimmy
Choos, bikinis, beaches, hot sex scenes. Fiona Walker’s books had all of this stuff,
AND horses, a bit like a Gen X Jilly Cooper.
I loved those books,
but I wasn’t any good at copying them. Maybe it was because I liked really
weird news stories, like the one about the woman who got her hair caught in a swimming
pool vent and drowned, while people merrily and obliviously used the pool for
several days before she was discovered.
My taste in books has changed over the last 15 -20 years, and I don't read the white wine and happy ending stories anymore. My heart lies with the gruesome and the strange; a spooky tale, a psychological thriller the cold prickles on the back of your neck; Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, Ann Rule, Gillian Flynn, a m homes, Zoe Heller, Ruth Rendell, Bram Stoker, Eerie, Indiana, The Missing, The Enfield Haunting. Really, it was always this way, from when I read The Haunting of Cassie Palmer, The Ghost of Thomas Kemp and The Children of Green Knowe when I was at middle school to The Shining and The Rats in my early teens.
I loved being scared shitless, I loved the feeling that when you closed the mirrored bathroom cabinet, there, behind you, might be a face, the boogeyman, Bloody Mary.
My taste in books has changed over the last 15 -20 years, and I don't read the white wine and happy ending stories anymore. My heart lies with the gruesome and the strange; a spooky tale, a psychological thriller the cold prickles on the back of your neck; Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, Ann Rule, Gillian Flynn, a m homes, Zoe Heller, Ruth Rendell, Bram Stoker, Eerie, Indiana, The Missing, The Enfield Haunting. Really, it was always this way, from when I read The Haunting of Cassie Palmer, The Ghost of Thomas Kemp and The Children of Green Knowe when I was at middle school to The Shining and The Rats in my early teens.
I loved being scared shitless, I loved the feeling that when you closed the mirrored bathroom cabinet, there, behind you, might be a face, the boogeyman, Bloody Mary.
And this brings me to the crux of this post. Authenticity.
A lot of self-help videos and blogs will go on about how in
order to be happy in your work, you need to find your true self, what makes
your soul happy, and do that. I have several issues with this.
1)
If we all did what truly made us happy, there
would be a lot of people dead, no one to keep the country’s basic facilities
running and a lot of make-up vloggers.
2)
Sometimes, you can’t do ‘what makes you happy’
because you have to do boring, adult things, like pay the rent and eat.
3)
Sometimes what would make you happy would be
standing on your desk and dancing like Claire in this clip from HBO TV series Six Feet Under. (working in an office was NOT her calling.)
4)
How exactly do you know what your calling
actually is?
I don’t KNOW what my calling is, or if I even have one. And
that’s why I have ended up, almost twenty years after I left school, in the
same meaningless jobs, wondering what I am there for, wondering where my
stories went, wondering why I can only write when I don’t have time, or when I
am totally miserable.
Finding and following your ‘true calling’ only really works
for two kinds of people. The first kind, who know from a very early age that
they want to be doctors, nurses, police officers, vets, camera men, solicitors,
lawyers, landscape gardeners, builders, mechanics, engineers, and chefs etc. and
the second kind; people who have the means / money to tell other people how to
be authentic and find their calling and call that a career.
‘Finding your true calling’ is utterly meaningless. I’m always getting sucked into TED Talks on
Youtube. Many of them are very, very good, but the ones about things like, ‘how
to find your perfect career’ and ‘what to do with your life’ tend to be someone
telling you that if you can’t find perfect career, ‘do what makes you happy’
Oh, OK. So I’ll find a job, then, where someone pays me to
get up in the morning, go for a walk in the country, eat cream buns and then
write about it. Or, where someone pays me to go to the gym. Or, to hang out at
my friends’ houses and play with their babies and drink tea. Or, go to the SoHo
Curzon cinema on a Wednesday morning and watch independent films. Or, spend
three hours in a stationery shop looking at pens and notebooks. Or, spend half
a day in charity shops looking for out of print paperbacks. What’s that, Skip? No-one is going to pay me to do those
things? But they make me happy!
They offer no practical advise whatsoever, just a load of
guff about how if you want to climb Everest, you should just go ahead and climb
Everest. Won’t my wheelchair stop me, though? Only if you let it! You are the
barrier, not the wheelchair, pal!
You’re taking it too literally, some might say. What they
mean is, find something that you can stand to do for 40 hours a week that
you’re vaguely happy doing. Something that doesn’t make you want to pour boiling water over your arm on Monday
morning.
On Tuesday, it will be the start of my third week in a new
job. Those of you who know where it is, please keep it quiet. Those who don’t –
when I decide whether I’m going to stay or go, and if you’re interested, I’ll
tell you. It’s not that it’s a bad place
to work – I’m not mining for blood diamonds or treating Ebola victims – it’s
just….it’s just it’s the same old officey shit. Everyone’s very nice and
friendly, and I am sure there are cliques and politics I don’t know about yet,
but I am just not sure I can do it anymore. The 9-5 (or 8.30 til 5.30, in my
case, which is actually a really long time to spend sitting in one place
wishing you were dead.) that vague feeling of free-floating, nameless dread – is this what I’m here for? The words
that strike terror in my heart:
Purchase orders
Productivity
Action plan
Meeting
The ring, ring, ring of reception trying to put someone
though to me when I’m on my lunch break (not her fault, she doesn’t know, and it's not her fault that there’s nowhere to really eat lunch apart from your desk)
the fact that I have not actually had a full lunch break since I started, and
that I actually start at 8 and finish at what’s more like 6. The fact I have
had almost no training but I am expected to get on with stuff. The fact I sit
there and don’t know what the hell I am doing.
It could be new job blues, I guess.
Or it could be, I’m not being true to my authentic self.
