Work
Last year, I wrote two takes of my own on work for the ‘work’ issue. I’ll post them here on consecutive days. —ed.
by Katherine—Age 28—New York City
Like most Americans, I wanted to get rich quick. This was around age eight or nine; I bursted with schemes, like starting a henhouse in our suburban backyard and selling eggs. My mother smiled noncommittally and I went back to the drawing board, dreaming of self-sufficiency and doing things my way. Several years later, hepped up on Babysitter’s Club books, I found a couple local mothers looking for cheap childcare. The responsibility caused panic attacks, worse than the time mom gave me twenty dollars to keep and I lost it under the gumball machine at Food Star. Ashamed of myself, I stayed out of the workforce till age 15, when I got a gig doing data entry after school at a family-owned health food store. Mind-numbing. Working at the coffee shop was better: customers, co-workers, interaction, the rich smell of beans in my clothes, good clean post-work exhaustion. College, my parents told me, was job number one, and I listened; the summer jobs (a museum, a restaurant, some desperate stabs at temping almost as panic-inducing as babysitting) hardly counted. One winter I worked for my father putting up oak siding outdoors. And I fretted about the future. I’d never wanted a job, not the kind where you apply and there’s a boss and you go and, my god, the panic again. Paid work felt like an ocean wave, something that was going to swallow me whole. I interned for a newspaper, a magazine. They were all right but I was still waiting to feel at home, the way I had in art studios and theaters, which always felt both fertile and safe. I was hoping to flail into something I cared about, a calling, a tribe. After according every job under the sun its fifteen minutes inside my head, I went to the best graduate program in English I could get into. The monastic commitment seemingly required of academics frightened me; furthermore, grad school didn’t feel like college. I’m out now, masters degreed, with a knowledge-worker job that pays the bills and oscillates between oppressive and interesting. I left with a feeling I was looking for something, looking to make good on something, a long-time dream. Be a creative person who lives in the city. Balance panic and desire, independence and worthwhileness. Know interesting people, do interesting things, and make ends meet. Is it too much to ask?
Image: wheany
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