Sui Generis wants to know what I’d be doing if I weren’t going to law school this fall.
Um.
It’s almost embarrassing to tell this story, but I will anyway. That’s what all-request days are about, right?
Mr. Angst has been planning to go back to graduate school for a while. Indeed, he probably could have gone back last fall, but we’d just gotten married a few months earlier, I had just landed a good new job, and we both figured we needed some time to prepare for such a thing. Also, we both felt that I needed at least a year in my new job to build up some good experience in it so I could move into a similar position wherever he’d end up being in school.
And then I decided to jump on the bandwagon and go to law school. Couldn’t just leave well enough alone. It’s funny, because when people ask us about this adventure, they tend to assume I decided to go to law school and Mr. Angst took the opportunity to get his master’s just because we’d be moving. Um, other way around. Sorry, honey. I knew I’d go back to grad school eventually. I guess I stole a little of his thunder.
So if I weren’t going to law school, I’d probaby be planning to do much the same thing that I’m doing now. Which is to say, I’d either be in my current job or I’d be looking for something similar in Mr. Angst’s grad school location.
It may not be apparent, but I like my job. It suits me in that I’m very good at it. I work fast, I have good ideas, and I’m valued. All of these things are Good Things.
But it’s not terribly fulfilling. My last job was terribly unfulfilling and that’s why I moved to this job. I thought this job would be more sastifying, and it is, but it’s still just not enough. I lack challenge. (I don’t know why I’m saying all this, since most of it’s in the archives, but whatever. It bears repeating from time to time.)
At any rate, let’s go with the hypothetical. If we were to stay where we are, I would probably end up taking on some greater responsibilities in my job, which I would actually really enjoy. I’d probably get to manage some contract workers, have some greater decision-making power, and could likely move up in this organization. And sometimes, I feel a twinge of regret that I won’t be able to do that. But I wouldn’t have been able to do that in any case, since we’d have been moving on for Mr. Angst.
So let’s assume I move onto a new city with my husband and don’t go to law school. I’d probably try and find a similar job, which means I’d probably end up being a technical writer or a copyeditor in a marketing firm. Maybe I’d be lucky enough to end up working in education as I have for the last several years. Or maybe I’d end up going corporate.
The gist of all this is that I don’t have an ideal career. Like Sui Generis I don’t know what the mythical dream is. If someone offered me a million dollars to do exactly what I wanted to do for a year and it could be anything, I’d probably end up doing a lot of reading, a fair amount of writing, and maybe some drawing. Sans drawing, that sounds sort of like being in law school. So I’ll go into $150,000 of debt for the honor of doing that for the next three years. And if I’m lucky, then someone will pay me to keep doing it for a while.
