The economy is bad right now; I know that. People are losing their homes left and right; companies are stagnant in their growth. Unemployment lingers around double digits, and those who are employed get their hours cut, salaries frozen, are forced into furloughs. And despite all this, I still sometimes sit at home and bemoan the fact that I do not feel passionate about my job.
Of course I work at it, try hard, and am grateful that I merely have a job in the first place. But underneath it all, I go home at night and think that I am not cut out for the job I do, and the job does not fill the space in my life that I need filled. And underneath that, deeper still, I hate the self-pity, know full well that I am fortunate beyond words to have a good job with a good company that treats its employees well.
I think I'm holding on to this notion that a job should be fulfilling. I should wake up each day and look forward to work, come home and feel like my days were spent doing what I loved. I don't. And while I think the luckiest people in the world do feel this way about their careers, I have an additional problem: I still don't know what it is I want to do, what I want to be when I "grow up." Trouble is, I am already grown up, already have a job, one I've convinced myself is not the something that will bring me fulfillment.
But yesterday, my boss sent out an e-mail to the team about the health care reform legislation, and her message was riddled with references to "our industry," "exciting developments," and being "fired up" about what the future holds for us. She regularly gets fired up about one thing or another, usually regarding exciting developments in our industry which I could not find less interesting, but this e-mail was different. It was emotional, came from a place that I never access while at work; the e-mail came from her heart.
For some reason, it made me realize that this could not have been her first choice of jobs. She could not, as a little girl, have actively wanted to be a manager at an insurance company; there is just no way. I know that she was a psychology major in college, currently wants to write a screenplay, practices both the physical and spiritual tenets of yoga and infuses them into everything she does. So why isn't she a marriage counselor, a playwright, a yogi? Insurance could not possibly be what she finds fulfilling.
But reading her e-mail yesterday, full of hope and passion, I saw that she has managed, somehow, to turn the job she has into what she's always wanted. Instead of finding one that molds to her expectations of what that job should be, she shaped herself to her job, found elements of it that matches the spaces in her life that she needs filled.
It made me realize that maybe I've been going about this whole "self-fulfillment" thing from the wrong angle.
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