Only that which is attainable
ever gets old.
My wife started a new job this week, in a totally new
industry for her. I’m proud of her for taking the risk and for achieving the
escape velocity required to leave the gravitational pull of the retail industry. She was comfortable in that she had mastered the day-to-day requirements, but ultimately unfulfilled - overqualified and underappreciated in her role. Watching her make this shift has brought me to reflect on my own career – specifically, how profoundly thankful and lucky
I am to have found my “forever job.”
I’ve been self-employed now for over a decade. It sounds
strange to say that – more than ten years of being my own boss, setting my own
schedule and priorities, and working mostly from a home office where I can wear fuzzy
bunny slippers all day long. It works for me in ways that working for others
never did largely because it allows for constant change and evolution. The phrase “I
work for myself,” which is how I typically answer the question, “what do you do
for a living,” is really a pretty broad catch-all, and in terms of what I’ve
actually done on a day-to-day basis for the last ten years it has changed radically. Because it turns out that my “forever job” isn't actually any one single, specific job at all, but rather a "forever search" for whatever I choose to do and whatever comes next.
Initially, when I left corporate America, I launched a fine
art leasing business in Chicago, and after a few years I was able to get it to
profitability, but just barely and not by a broad enough margin that I could
really live a decent life. So, when one of my old colleagues asked if I would
contract myself out to the large accounting firm they worked at as a proposal
writer, I jumped at the opportunity. And when another old colleague asked if I
could help write resumes for her clients, I said yes to that too. Six years
later, those two things make up roughly all of my income.
They’ve been the right combination of revenue streams and
the ideal fit for me. They play to my strength as a writer and a story teller;
work that I’m generally pretty passionate about doing. But over the past few
years, another, deeper passion has reemerged from where it was hiding out in my
childhood’s backyard jungle kingdom. It’s what I’ve been documenting in this
blog – searching out and exploring those architectural oddities, those roadside
attractions and wonders (both natural and unnatural) that dot our world. Now I
find myself seeking out and incorporating ways to monetize that passion as a
third stream of revenue. Maybe as a tour guide, a travel writer, an amateur photographer,
and maybe as a professional blogger (I’ll let you be the judge of that last one).
Is it something I could see doing forever? Even after I’d
seen every taxidermied monkey/fish combo passed off as a Fiji Mermaid,
after I’d passed through the gates of every DIY castle in the country, wandered through every junkyard turned outsider artist compound, after I‘d
walked every secret street and garden, been on every ghost tour, examined every surgical
museum, stood in front of every offbeat memorial, monument and marker, after
all of that would I still crave more?
Yes, I’m convinced that I would – enough so that I’ll give
it a go. Past as precedent, it may lead me to something else – old stone
rubbing perhaps (an Etsy-esque craft phenomenon waiting to happen if ever there
was one), possibly starting a soap museum with Jen, or maybe, just as likely,
something I haven’t even remotely considered yet.
The search itself is and has, after all, always been my
ideal destination. And after many years of trying (and failing) to crack the
code from a cubicle identical to all the others in a downtown commercial high-rise
identical to all the others, I finally figured out how to monetize my interests and creative endeavors.
It’s changing again now – my job description. You’ve been
watching it happen here in real time, post by post. Steve’s death sprung the lock;
leaving Chicago knocked down the door.
Nowadays I’m more of an informal anthropologist with a sub-specialization in the supernatural. I’m a Ballardian recorder of the next millennium’s
archaeological finds and explorer of modern urban ruins. I’m a self conscious mosaic of highly
curated, customized experiences. I’m a DM IRL. I chase dinosaurs and cryptids.
If anybody asks though, just tell them I work for myself.
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