Last year, my husband was working as a nonprofit finance director when he decided that office work didn’t make him happy. He wanted a more active job that enabled to him to help people—so he began making plans to transition out of his nonprofit position and return to school to become a certified paramedic, all with the goal of securing employment within our city’s EMS department.
That was less than a full year ago. Today, I’m writing this post only hours after watching his EMS cadet academy graduation, where he was officially sworn in as a city EMS employee.
During the graduation ceremony, our mayor told the EMS cadets (and I’m paraphrasing here):
Your job might make the difference between life or death for some of the people you help. You’ll respond to a call and feel the family members looking to you as the only person who can save the life of their loved one. That can be a lot to bear.
Talk about pressure. The mere thought of being a paramedic makes me feel panicky, but my husband has the temperament for it. So while he’s out saving lives, I guess I’ll be at my desk, contributing to society by . . . writing stories about zoophilia?
Throughout my career so far, which has included nonprofit, corporate, and academic positions, I’ve tried to keep the big picture in mind and consider what I was ultimately working for. Did I believe in the organization’s mission, and did my work matter on some level beyond improving the bottom line? I began asking myself these questions during my first professional job, and I haven’t stopped since.
In fact, I have this embarrassing memory of being fresh out of college in my first real job when I broke down in tears while questioning my career path. Coincidentally, I’d just left a fancy work function where I’d had far too much chardonnay. During my train ride home, I explained to my then-boyfriend how I should have tried to find work in the publishing industry after all, since, my reasoning went, “books are at least a good force in the world.”
Yes, let’s all share a cringe at my wine-soaked naïveté about what working in publishing is like. But if I could talk to that younger version of myself now, I’d let her know that while it might have taken a number of years, she succeeded in cobbling together a working life from her love of books—by teaching writing, by freelancing, and by working part-time for a library. Maybe none of this is on the same level as saving someone’s life, but it’s work that I feel good about doing.
It’s too easy to romanticize most jobs, anyway. My husband would be the first to point out that working as a paramedic doesn’t necessarily entail saving a life every day. And while I will never doubt the power of a good book to change a life, I also understand that the world would keep spinning if I put down my pen.
After all, I’m not a stranger to ambivalence from the outside. When I left my corporate job a few years ago to earn my MFA fiction, some people questioned my decision. I watched my husband go through the same thing when he decided to resign from his job to become a paramedic. Generally speaking, the expectation is that you’ll advance your career in a linear fashion and always strive to earn more prestige and money, not less. And yet here we are.
Cheryl Strayed once said that writing is hard, but coal mining is harder. That’s no less clear to me now as I watch my husband head out for a shift that will likely be physically and mentally exhausting. And I teach a workshop, or coach a writer who needs guidance, or help plan a special Shakespeare event at the library.
We’re both navigating new territory in our work. The process is imperfect, and it’s not always easy, but we’re doing it—we’re changing our own lives.