What Is Your Day Job?

Another blog meme, from problogger.

This one caught my eye, as I've been thinking quite a lot about my [lost] professional life. I've referred to myself as a workaholic, which is, I suppose, true -- but that minimalizes me, and my work, in a way that I don't feel is just. I was career-focused, and worked long hours, and loved my jobs. But I also, always, had a 'personal' life.

It wasn't work that stole my personal life from me; it was illness -- which stole it all. I've been thinking of ways to reclaim, and then let go, of my 'work history', and my identification with same. I've been thinking -- maybe I need to write a different kind of resume, one that's made of stories, instead of job titles. Perhaps that would help me to relinquish.

Of course, I've struggled with this, off and on, for a decade now. It's resurfaced, partly, I think, because of those silly little Moo Minicards.

For most of my adult life, I've had business cards, complete with job title and so on. The Moo cards give me an unbusiness card, and an opportunity to claim a new kind of identity.

Blogger. Poet. Snapshotter.

Is that enough?

Is that being of use?

What is Your ‘Day Job’?

Coming soon:

• Novelist! 

Currently:   

• Blogger, Poet, Snapshotter 

Previously:

• Program Director, community mental health center
• Program Director, drug & alcohol education agency
• Grant Writer for above
• Grants Reviewer for state agency
• Executive Director, treatment agency for violent offenders
• Program Director, sex offender treatment program
• Clinician, sex offender treatment programs
• Medical Social Worker, hospital psychiatric unit
• Clinical Social Worker, community mental health center
• Instructor, university social work program
• Graduate Student
• Program Director, rape crisis center
• Independent Consultant & Group Facilitator
• 'Para-faculty', state college
• Counselor, college counseling center
• Counselor, college placement office
• Executive Secretary, college student activities fund
• College Student
• Waitress
• Secretary, various private and governmental organizations
• Grocery Clerk
• Nurse Aide, hospital psychiatric unit
• Movie Theater Cashier & 'Usherette'
• High School Student
• Day Care Aide
• Babysitter

I can't find my resume, so I may have forgotten something. Probably did.

Comments

[Mary Scriver]

I can hardly say this strongly enough. With your gifts and your sensibility it would be verging on the criminal and negligent for you NOT to write about your life, beginning to end, as deeply as you can. If there is any knowledge we need (from as up close as can be had without danger) it is about the side of life that you KNOW about, you could show us. If that isn't a vocation, I don't know what is.

It's not as though I don't take my own advice.

Prairie Mary

[SB]

I'm glad you do take your own advice; it gives me good reading.

We'll see, next month, if I have much prose in me.

[John Andrew Denny]

Dear Sharon,
I am writing because I would like your permission to include your poem ‘Fibromyalgia’ in an anthology I am compiling of poems for people who are chronically ill and in pain. I love your poem because if expresses so well the way we are painfully divided in our mind between our past and imaginative selves and our present broken physical selves.
Please let me know if you like the idea.
John