A dreamer deferred

As a girl growing up in Detroit in the early 1980s, my dream job seemed easily attainable. I wanted to be a major league baseball manager. I knew a lot about baseball, I liked bossing people around; it seemed natural.

As I got older, I realized how unrealistic that dream was. I set my sights on a new career. I was going to be a fashion designer. My own outfits had always garnered a lot of attention (not necessarily complimentary attention, but attention all the same). It was time to put my artistic skills to work for the greater good of fashionable society.

The next turning point came when my older sister moved in with us while she finished law school. Something about the way she talked about it made it seem very glamorous (at least to a 12-year-old). And another career path was put into place.

After 10 years of chasing the dream of being an attorney (John Grisham should have to pay for my first three years of college- talk about glamorizing law), I realized something that until then seemed inconsequential. I hated law.

After completing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in communication, I taught for a while. But I’m still at a loss as to what I want to be when I grow up. The thing is, the one thing I have always loved to do is write. However, the going rate for writers is $0.00, or something slightly lower, counting postage.

Now I’m a secretary. It pains me a little to type that- to see the words come up on the screen and know that it is true. I can always tell myself it is a temporary situation. But I have held meaningless jobs for many years now. For someone with such high hopes as a child, I feel like the real world has come crashing down upon me with medical bills and car payments and student loans. All the practicalities of life make it impossible to quit the job where my most noteworthy praise is my ability to decipher dictation.

I am left with just a glimmer of hope that around the bend is the career I didn’t know I wanted.

The dreamer is deferred, but not destroyed.