i am not done yet
Lucille Clifton • 1936-2010
as possible as yeast
as imminent as bread
a collection of safe habits
a collection of cares
less certain than i seem
more certain than i was
a changed changer
i continue to continue
what i have been
most of my lives is
where i’m going
“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” -André Gide
Choose Your Own Adventure
02.24.2024
Hello Dear Reader,
When you were young, did anyone ever ask you what you wanted to be when you grow up? Do you remember considering being an astronaut? A pilot? An actor? Personally, I always wanted to be a writer.
There is a lot lurking in this question. In one sense, it valorizes the professional sphere of adulthood at an age when commercialization is not developmentally conceivable. Meaning making is conflated with money making. In another sense, it proposes that a desire is achievable as such. Finally, this question is one of linguistic and existential paradox: to be/being. The fixed noun of a work identity requires the gerund verb of action, and the action presupposes the achievement of a fixed identity.
I had been pondering this mystery throughout my three years of graduate training in Marriage & Family Therapy until an instructor asked another question: Do you work to live or live to work?
Perhaps, somewhere along our developmental paths, when we realize the financial, social, and systemic barriers to our desired professional trajectory, the choice of what to be transmutes into the choice of how to survive.
Would the young child who answered, "astronaut!", and ultimately achieved this professional identity, say he lived to work or worked to live?
Writing is a means of living, living a process of storying a life, a life full of choices large and small, choices made with intention and those with none. Consider your life formatted as a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, and the choices you didn't realize you were making become question marks at every step on your path. Which direction you go next is yours to determine.
So, dear reader. What would you like to be when you grow up?
