Some people are so drawn into a particular vocation that it is never a question what they will do with their career lives. Yesterday I wrote: It is my understanding that I am a poet, an identity cryptic as it is. Being a poet is a full time job. PERSONAL CHALLENGE Next year, my seior year of college, I challenge myself to the hard work of being a whole person and working for that person. How I make my money is not the core of who I am or my identity. How I make my money IS part of who I am and how I feel about myself and th world. I don't deny that. But the core of my life is my poetry, my personality, my history, my origin, my beliefs, my relationships with people and animals, rocks, vegitation, and water. How I care for the people I love, my family, my friends, my pets, even my dark sides and shaddows. Today my money comes from Social Security. I draw a disability check that gives me just enough money to scrape by, not to get ahead or be overly hopeful... But even people with this kind of welfare money can get past that confused identity and the negative connotations "disabled" brings. Even I can dream so hard my dreams grow into real things of words, symbols, books, and poetry.
I was thinking this morning that I am not Called to news writing. Some good people are still in that field, like every other field. But that is not where my heart is. Then I had a pretty big revalation concerning my desire to teach. I am very at odds with myself over teaching. I think teaching is the most valient career. All my favorite people are professors and teachers. I think it is the most honest way of making money, next to farming. I am an "alternative person" as my people group was once described my therapist. JoyAnna, my best friend, always encouraged me to embrace my counterculture/alternative lifestyle, and she attested that I do not need a career at all. Whether I call it a career or not, I do want to work for money. JoyAnna may have been projecting her desire to barter, which she now does fabulously. But she is right; I am alternative.
This is a separate thought, but I also had a catharsis about what I want to do for money. I just came up with this career that I have no idea if it has already been invented. Since I had a recent fight with my father, whom I had always used as a therapist, on Anna's off days, (we all need therapy)... Since that dispute, I became very depressed, but I finally learned how to sort out my thoughts in writing. And I believe in therapeutic writing. I believe in it so intensely - in fact it sums up two interconnected aspects of my life that I engage in every day. I do not have a degree in therapy, teaching, or writing today. I will have a BA in English writing in a year. I do not know how I am going to go about this, but I really would like to professionally encourage people, from all walks of life, towards writing. I could do it online or in a community college. And as of this moment, one half hour after coining the term (as far as I know), I want to be a therapeutic writing teacher. I want to be a therapeautic writing teacher. I want to be a therapeutic writing teacher. My whole self is glowing from this personal interior designing. I am going to be a therapeautic writing teacher, a person with one main intention: encouraging her students to dig for their personal depth, to untangle the roots of their concerns, worries, and shaddows through artful written words.