Sunday, September 18, 2016

Making a Big Change

A couple of weeks ago, I read an article in The New York Times called “Hesitant to Make that Big Life Change? Permission Granted”.

In the article, Carl Richards writes about why some of us have trouble making big changes. He believes one reason is our desire for permission to make such changes. He writes: "Seeking approval and external validation is part of the human experience, but when it comes to making a big life change, they can be hard to find."

About nine months ago, I set out to make a big change in my life - or at least work toward one. After years of complaining about my career path, I enrolled myself in a local community college and signed up for several classes in psychology, sociology, and philosophy. I wasn't quite sure what was next, but I wanted to give myself a chance to explore and see what I liked, to do what I wished I had done more of when I was too young and insecure to give myself permission to try my hand at something that didn't fit the script. For several hours, twice a week, I drove to the local campus and wedged myself into chair-desks to sit next to kids who hadn’t even been born when I received my B.A. and were still peeing in their diapers when I received my J.D. I raised my hands frequently enough to receive full participation points and felt a stupid mix of pride and shame each time teachers commented "Great!!!" with a smiley face on my homework or read my papers out loud as examples of how to write cogently. As far as I could tell, I was older than every teacher except one, who was my age.

I am now in my second semester at the community college, mainly to fulfill some prerequisites for a graduate level program in psychology, while studying for the GREs (yes, yet another standardized test). I am still not quite sure what I am doing, but I feel a certain amount of self-imposed pressure to define a direction for myself, so that I could tell myself and others what the hell I am doing with my life. After all, I am 45.

The one pervading feeling throughout all of this has been a disquieting sense of illegitimacy. In so many respects. I mean, really, I am a mom with one kid who just learned how to tie his shoelaces and another who still eats her boogers. How can I justify sitting in a library outlining social psychology when I have little finger nails to clip and healthy meals to plan and playdates to coordinate? Am I not supposed to be helping them prepare for life, instead of still fixating on my own development? Besides, I already have my B.A. and a J.D. Why the hell am I still hanging out with a bunch of kids who are trying to gain admission to four-year colleges? I could tell from the looks on some of the kids in my classes that they were wondering what went wrong with my career that I was now back at ground zero with them. (No, I did not go into the details about the inanities of corporate America.) And how about being a full-fledged adult with some income to show for it? Isn't it completely self-indulgent to be a student full time?

When I read Richards' article, I realized the unease I've been feeling for the past eight months was the discomfort of not having been granted permission, of not having received validation. Not from any specific person, but in a more cosmic sense. From the world we live in. The world I live in has pretty clear guidelines. Go to school, figure out a career in your 20s, plan a family, lean in and work up the ranks to partnership or management, save up, and retire when you have a decent nest egg. Sure, we deviate sometimes, but on the whole, that's where we fall in if we claim to be a certain kind of adult.

Validation is a big thing for someone like me, for someone who was raised as I was. An Asian, a good daughter, a middle child, an immigrant. I've lived my whole life seeking and receiving approval. I still remember how it felt to start receiving more attention as I began bringing straight As home, how it felt to receive recognition for helping out around the house as my parents started working long hours at their store. I'm one of those good kids, someone who never rebelled, who always accommodated, often to my detriment. I also have a lifetime practice of trying to fit in, as an outsider in America, even to the point of wearing blue eye shadow in high school. Thank goodness we left Texas.  

I read somewhere that most of us live as we think we ought to. We pick up a script that tells us how we're supposed to live, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to enact it. So maybe this process of validating a big change is simply a cognitive exercise. Will it into your script, and voila, it's yours to follow. That is more or less what I've been trying to do. Looking for examples of people who've already done what I am trying to do. There is an endless list of successful women who started their careers mid-life: Vera Wang, Toni Morrison, Julia Childs, Martha Stewart, and so many others like those profiled here. I keep meeting them in my own life as I explain to others why I'm back in school while my husband drops off the kids in the morning. Every mom I meet has a story about someone in her family or someone she knows who went back to school after they had kids. One lady I met volunteering told me that she cried and cried while she tried to decide whether to go back to school in her late 30s. When she called her dad and lamented she was going to be too old for school, he responded, "Well, you're going to get old anyway."

So I will quiet that little voice that nags that I'm too old, that I already missed my opportunity to set a direction for myself, that I should have been bolder in my youth, that I will be 50 by the time I graduate from yet another school, that I am being frivolous, that this is not my time, that it is too late...

I'll cling to that mantra. I'm getting old anyway. Might as well try it. 

3 comments:

  1. Good for you! Starting a new career is quite brave, and hard to do because it's just so easy to stick with what you're already doing. Good luck!

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  2. As someone who read about you on Above the Law the year after I graduated, who now lives overseas and is desperately looking for a way off this treadmill (try moving to a country where student debt isn't reflected in legal salaries - even at the highest end of the market), thanks very much for this.

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  3. Thank you for posting this. Whether you ever get approval from the "world" or not, you will know that you did the right thing when you feel better in those few moments before you go to sleep. In my experience, there and then you know whether you had a good day or not.

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