WITHOUT THIS, WHO AM I?

Turns out I do have a career.

I've spent my entire adult life explaining that I never really had a career -- I got that degree in Sociology at age 33 after supporting Hub through a bazillion years of school and training programs, then when I was all set to go to grad school (Women's Studies/Communications) we got notice that our adoption was about to happen.  I literally walked out of the class registration line at UW and never looked back.

I stayed home with my boys until the youngest started middle school.  Then one of my best friends talked me into applying for a job in her foster care program at a local social service agency.  I worked there for the next 10 years.  Was that a "career"?  I always just felt it was  'job' I lucked into and that I loved mostly because of the people I was working with.

It takes me awhile to wake up to my own reality sometimes.  I so often fail to see my own gifts, talents, and skills as meaningful in "real world" vernacular or valued by "real world" criteria.  But the other night, as I made the pronouncement to Hub that I make periodically:  "I'm taking a hiatus from organizing anything for 6 months!  I'm going on Sabbatical!"  Sabbatical?  This is something career people do; not people like me who just volunteer their time.  And why, lately, do I feel an almost desperate need to just STOP inventing, organizing, facilitating, planning???

Maybe because this has been my career for nearly 40 years.  I started being an "organizer" in 1973, at age 23, when I woke up to the Women's Rights movement and took to the streets in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, with other feminist friends formed a Consciousness Raising group, helped organize the first ever Women's Conference at Triton Community College outside Chicago where we were able to entice Germaine Greer to be our keynote speaker....

And it went on from there.  I have ALWAYS organized and facilitated something for some cause or personal growth issue near and dear to me.  Peace actions, clubs, political campaigns, women's issues, co-op preschool and PTA, foster care, intentional community, men's and women's personal growth workshops, retreats, and support groups, meditation Sangha, ecstatic dance, elder awareness, church services, parties, benefits....

I'm not unique in this.  Not by a long shot.  I just never have given my work the title "career".  But that's what it feels like; something I've learned to do through study, trial, error, mentoring, and experience.  Mostly I do it well.  And it's hard for me to say no, so I do still have passion for it.  I just get tired and sometimes just want to "show up"; not plan and/or be the show.

Having said that, I also have a fear that without this work I will have no connection to community, no friends, no social life.  And that's when it hit me that my fear of "retiring" is much the same as that experienced by those who retire from a more clearly defined career in their chosen and more identifiable fields (teacher, doctor, CEO).  If I don't do this work anymore, who am I?

Pondering, not yet ready to draw my pension, but feeling the tug of letting go of some of the responsibility and stress of my self-employed, and unpaid, career.  Ambivalence reigns and I'm just looking at this with warm curious attention for now.  Not gone yet, but maybe cutting back to quarter-time.

At least, that's the view from here...©