Finding a purpose

Standing at the sink this morning washing dishes I replayed a couple of memories from early childhood. There was one Sunday at church with grandma when they did a rare children’s segment down front for everyone to observe. A dozen or so of us wee ones assembled there, and we were asked to think about what we would like to be when we grew up. The woman leading the exercise held up a series of small, hand-written signs listing various professions, one by one, and each child was asked to step up and claim their preference as it was revealed. Miraculously there were no hiccups and each of the children accepted a job without question or competition just as naturally as if the signs had read their names. I remember being acutely aware that we were quite literally on stage, under close observation by a sea of adults whose silence did nothing to deaden the weight of their audience. I didn’t feel particularly drawn to any of the cards she held up, so I just waited obediently and let the others take their turn until I was the only one left. Being the only remaining unemployed participant brought an additional level of conspicuousness, and I remember the palpable anticipation of what that last card might say. Somewhere deep down I hoped that it said something that fit me as perfectly as the previous cards seemed to fit the other kids, some definitive purpose that had never occurred to me before, as if it might lend the kind of security that comes with certainty about one’s place in the world. When she finally held it up for us all to see, it read “home maker.” All of my built up anticipation was deflated like a balloon. Here was the furthest thing from confirmation, left to the last like scraps on a plate, but this was no time to let them see me sweat. Everyone was watching and the show must go on. The demonstration was over and people had lost interest so I accepted my designated job – hardly considered a real job in those days – and we all went back to our regularly scheduled lives. While I can hypothesize now, I’ve no real memory of what the spiritual lesson was intended to be.

What I do remember is how this was just one of countless repeated experiences when I was aware of far more than I had words to express. Not only did I know things, but I also doubted that anybody else knew these things and there was no way that I could make them hear me even with the eloquence of a poet. Even before I developed the necessary vocabulary I understood that nobody, least of all adults, (at best they were too entertained by my maturity to hear my message and at worst they dismissed me as an insignificant child not worth hearing out), could comprehend my brand of reality. The frustration I felt with this inarguable truth was overwhelming. Early on I learned to adopt a self-imposed mutism to avoid the aggravation that inevitably came with any effort to communicate.  

The most discouraging thing about my predicament was neither the annoyingly persistent evidence of my inherent difference from everyone else nor the inability to be understood; it was the lack of any additional information which might shed light on how or why any of this was meaningful. I’ve always been OK with different. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t different. Not much point in lamenting what I was made to be. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any place to accommodate my differentness. Even in our present time of celebrating diversity, I still haven’t found a “job” that fits me. If different is what I was made to be, what on earth was I made to do?

It is common practice to ask children what they want to be when they grow up. We regularly tell our youth that they can do anything they set their minds to. What a beautiful liberty to have a society where you aren’t arbitrarily limited by the circumstances into which you are born and have no hope to change. I know, I know, this isn’t as true as we’d like it to be once we scratch the surface of it, but it’s a hell of an improvement compared to where we’ve been in the past. The first thing I remember reporting in response to this question was that I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t arrive at this decision as early as some. In early childhood, as it was that Sunday morning in church, I hadn’t the foggiest idea what I wanted to be. None of the options I’d been presented with felt right, so I just muddled along waiting for my glass slipper to appear.

I think it was about 4^th grade when I settled on writer. One of the enrichment perks of my gifted and talented program included a regular push-in from a content-specific teacher to focus exclusively on creative writing. She was a strikingly beautiful woman with curly blonde hair and a ski jump nose. I didn’t really like her but I took to the whole writing thing like a fish to water. Here was something that felt so genuinely natural that I couldn’t understand the need for formal instruction, and it came so effortlessly that I soon wrote spontaneously the way an artist paints or a bird lays an egg. Others seemed to find me so oddly talented that they came away a bit bewildered by how and what I produced. I remember noting how easily impressed they were with what I felt was mediocre work. But then again, when did I ever share popular opinion?

I abandoned the idea of being a writer not long after I had discovered it. At the time I didn’t see much likelihood of earning a living that way. At that time I had a very limited view of career options and I was far too young for anyone to think about counseling me on my options. The only successful writers I saw were those authors who were fortunate enough to have their books chosen for publication, and the chances of that were too slim for me to build a future on. I mean, how could I possibly expect that anything I wrote would prove attractive enough to be financed by some big publisher when nobody up to that point had ever taken anything I had to say for free? No, that was too much uncertainty for a little worm on a big hook like me. I abandoned writing as a frivolous waste of time and saved my energy for a more promising career path to present itself. Soon enough I felt pressured to choose something while there was still sufficient time to master it. It was in this manner that my education and consequent vocation played out, not so much a reflection of my heart’s desire but a process of elimination to arrive at the safest possible bet.