Re-Inventing Yourself

Edge City

Re-Inventing Yourself

by Dennis Green

I sometimes joke that I’ve already had at least seven incarnations during this one lifetime, but there is much real truth to that. My life as a university classroom teacher bears very little resemblance to the life as a full-time writer I live today, or even those years when I was hyper-active with the Alameda Chamber of Commerce, another life all its own. And along the way, I’ve made some remarkable re-inventions of my self, my personality, my abilities and my interests. Wazzup with that? as my boyz might say.

I think that all of us, in spite of our best-laid plans and best intentions, reach, from time to time, that existential void where the bottom drops out from underneath us and what we have been doing ceases to have the meaning or satisfaction it once held. And I’m not merely talking about familiarity that leads to complacency or boredom.

They tell us that young people leaving school today will have, on average, anywhere between 3-5 different careers in their lifetimes. Not just different jobs in different companies, but entirely different careers. And a turbulent economy is only one reason that is true.

But the gold watch after 50 years in the same role with the same organization may be a thing of the past. Job security is rare in most professions, except teaching, where tenure is still the general rule. But I think that’s a good thing.

When I was still in graduate school, working toward my Master’s degree in English Lit, my dream was to be a writer. I had a minor in “Creative Writing,” and had already completed my first novel, Sketches of Boyhood & Youth, and had seen 12 of its chapters published in the UC Santa Barbara literary magazine, Spectrum.

One of my professors and mentors, Ed Loomis, was Chair of the English Department and had proposed to the Academic Senate the creation of an MFA degree, a “Master of Fine Arts” for writers like myself. In the meantime, I was also working as a teaching assistant just to pay the bills. Alas, the MFA did not come to pass, my novel was rejected by Viking Press by a very kindly editor, and I drifted into full-time teaching.

And I loved it, loved the subject, the students, reading and grading and commenting on their papers, the lively classroom discussions, the office hours, the long summers off, reading and body surfing on the beaches of Santa Barbara. Nine years later, though, I knew that if I did it one more year, I would come to hate it. So I quit.

As a lifetime member of my alumni association, I was eligible for free career counseling at the University, and the counselor pointed out to me the many other professions I might qualify for with all that experience as a teacher: high-end sales, marketing, advertising, journalism, legal research and fact-checking, theatrical “audience development,” editing and working as a literary agent. I chose editing and almost immediately, and coincidentally, landed a position as Senior Editor at the University, in Alumni Affairs.

And by now, thirty-five years later, I have explored most of those other options, and the lives they bring with them — as an independent advertising consultant, as a head of public relations, in marketing, as co-owner of my own boutique ad agency, in audience development at the Mark Taper Forum and briefly with A.C.T., and now as a journalist, blogster and poet.

While I believe that we remain one person throughout our lifetimes, with an integrity of personality and spirit, I also believe that we make dramatic, even radical changes in our lives as a matter of course. We may marry, or divorce, we may have children, or become chronically ill. We may experience success, or failure, and “meet those two imposters” just the same. William Butler Yeats wrote about “Personae” and masks and identities we take on and cast off again as readily as changing a suit of clothes.

I suspect that your very next adventure might well emerge from re-inventing yourself and changing what you do with all those talents and the energy you possess. For my own next trick…

©2009 Dennis Green