Naked Me

The other day someone shared a meme on Instagram that said:

Family member: “What are you doing with your life?”

Me: “It’s a surprise.”

I chuckled when I saw it. It resonated. I took a screenshot and continued scrolling. The end.

Or so I thought. Turns out, the meme stuck with me. I thought about it while cleaning the house and while out berry picking. I thought about what “What are you doing with your life?” actually means.

When I was very little, I wanted to be a vet. In fact, I wanted to be a vet who rode her horse to work every day. And, here’s the kicker, I wanted to marry my parents. Well, that plan changed when I realized a few things: 1) I don’t do too well with sick humans, so that could probably be extended to include animals, and 2) I can’t marry my parents (which was fine because by then I’d developed a crush on a boy in my school named Adam and I was more interested in marrying him).

As I got older, my professional aspirations changed. I wanted to be a police officer. Then a lawyer. Then an academic. And now? Now I genuinely don’t know what I want to be when I “grow up”.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s a question we’re often asked as children. In fact, I just posed this question to child this week. I’ve always thought that it’s a question that inspires curiosity and dreams and that it gives children something to reach for. But then I wondered if perhaps my feelings around this were…maybe not entirely wrong, but certainly flawed.

Professional aspirations and chosen profession are key points of discussion among both young and old. From young children posing beside chalkboards that indicate the grade they’re in, their age and height, and what they want to be when they grow up to adults in a social setting asking a new acquaintance what they do for a living, a great deal of our focus, as a society, is on professional accomplishments and accolades.

The meme I saw this week made me wonder where and how personal aspirations fall into this discussion. I wondered to what extent we consider the foundational characteristics we want to live our lives by.

I’ll be the first to admit that I never really considered what kind of person I aspire to be personally. Instead, before moving to Beaver Creek, my primary focus had to do with professional accomplishments. I wanted a PhD before I was 30. I wanted to teach at a university. In many ways I was on track to achieve those goals – I’d been teaching at a university, and I’d progressed from PhD student to PhD candidate. Moving north derailed those plans. Not entirely, and certainly not in a bad way. Moving north allowed me to look beyond professional accomplishments and to consider the type of person I want to be. My horizons broadened and my goals became more holistic and, I would argue, healthier.

Who we are personally and the characteristics that guide us or that we strive for are the backbone of who we are. So, this week I wondered why those characteristics are not the ones we focus on developing. After all, they are likely to drive our professional goals as well.

Since moving north, I have had time to consider the characteristics that are important to me. I’ve considered how I want to lead my life. Much of this has been driven by necessity because of my circumstances. For example, self-sufficiency is a characteristic that I’ve had to develop while living in Beaver Creek, and it’s one that I now realise is important to me. It’s something I intend to carry with me long after leaving the north.

One’s profession is sometimes just a personal accoutrement. It’s the clothes one puts on rather than the naked self. It can certainly be one’s life’s work, one’s calling and legacy, one’s “self,” and I think this is what we all hope for, but it often isn’t. Only if we’re very lucky is our professional self so enmeshed with our “naked” self that it’s difficult to distinguish one from the other. More often, perhaps, work is “just a job”. The thing we do so that we can afford to do what we define as fun or leisure or play.

In either case, there’s the person behind the work. The person who is doing the work. And the north has made me connect with that person. Me. Me without a title. Me without a role. Naked me.