Coming Home – from a career

I surprised myself by trying to dissuade my daughter from attending University. “It’s an expensive adventure to go on if you’re not actually interested in the course,” I warned her. I was a little shocked to realise that it was me saying those words. I had an incredible time during my years at Uni and I would love her to have the same experience. It led me to the world I live in now. Isn’t the goal to educate your children with an ultimate aim of tertiary qualifications? Who was I to be encouraging her to do exactly the opposite of that? True, we are still in the middle of Covid19 and the impact of disruption on the final years of her schooling is incalculable. I know who I was really wanting to hear those words.

I was speaking to me. 

It was 1990 when I had to choose my University course. We were in the early days of an economic recession. My father, a practical, successful and focused man, preferred that I find a course that would ‘have a job at the end of it’. That’s how I found myself enrolled in speech pathology. My ‘best of both worlds’, an Arts degree but with a defined job at the end of it. 

I scraped my way through the four years of the course like a deer in the headlights. I needed all my skills of observation and resourcefulness to keep up with the new world of Melbourne, residential college and university study. But I loved it. I loved the science of anatomy and physiology. Psychology, neuropsychology, abnormal psychology, these subjects thrilled me to the core as I found concepts and shape for how the mind works. But my favourites were the communication subjects. Language development, neurolinguistics, counselling, voice and fluency. The world of neurology was a revelation. These were the building blocks to communication. I decided I was in the right place.

I was a practicing clinician for ten years. The need to take a break from clinical work is a common one. It comes to all of us in every helping profession at some point. For some it is burnout, for others it is a purposeful change in career. Family interrupts the flow of work. There are those who need to know more and take on research. Some teach. For me, despite the myriad successes with improving how someone lived their life, the fatigue inherent in dealing with problems, sadness, and loss, every single day took its toll on my ability to give of myself. I went into management. Of course I did! I have never been so proud as being able to call myself the ‘Chief Speech Pathologist’. Proud and a little embarrassed, a chief is, after all, a strange title to give someone. We used to call my dad ‘Chief Chicken-Shit ‘(with love!) and we were big fans of Get Smart. Being a Chief may have been intended as an honourable title but I have to say it felt like I had a role in a comedy!

For nearly 12 years I wore this title. I learned how to lead a team. I learned the mechanics of management. I learned strategic communication, business communication, the language of different professional groups. I learned a huge amount about miscommunication. My knowledge of communication became the value I brought to work, to my team and to my service. It was the basis of my work in health literacy and it drove me to support shared decision making and consumer participation in patient care.

Then, at the end of 2021, after over twenty-five years in the health industry, I gave notice of my intention to leave. It was time to go home.

And here I am. At home. Scrimping to make my savings last for as long as possible. Reacquainting myself with my husband and children who saw very little of me through 2020-2021. Resurrecting my garden. Remembering how to cook. I’ve written the first draft of a novel, planned the second, launched the blog and pulled up my big girl pants to step into the world of social media. 

I have had months now to reflect on the topic of career and purpose and writing about it has seemed too hard, too sensitive, too soon. I couldn’t find the words to explain to myself what I was thinking of doing let alone anyone else in my professional world. It doesn’t fit in the accepted mould of climbing the ladder, taking the next role, sharing it all on LinkedIn. There is no celebrated process for announcing that you are choosing to leave, that you have voluntarily quit the industry with no future employment plan. The ‘choice sabbatical’ brings bewilderment to those who ask me ‘what job are you going to do?” I have no satisfactory explanation to make them, or me, feel more comfortable with the concept. The truth is that I had no idea what work I would do next. All I knew was that I did not want to do what I had been doing. I knew that I did want to play with words. 

Whether it was the pandemic shocking me into honesty or being the age I am where women cut the bullshit and say what they mean or the reality of a world where politics are taking us further away from humanity instead of closer the result is that I realised life is short. I might not be privileged to live for fifty more years. I might not get the chance to find out who else I could be. It’s time now. i think this is why I was so hesitant about my daughter going to University. It felt similar to my own experience and perhaps I was just hoping to help her circumvent some of the time I took to recognise my own passion. Just in case you’re curious – no, you can’t actually do this for your kids. They have to live their own lives and they will find their own paths… But it didn’t stop me from trying to draw on the map!

Losing my identity as a speech pathologist continues to be a challenge. I’m learning to answer the inevitable question of ‘what do you do?” with “I’m a writer”. The question really is ‘how do you earn your money?” and there is no corresponding incoming wealth with the way I spend my time. The question also asks ‘where do I categorise your social standing?’ I still find it so confronting! But I am answering truthfully. It is what I do. I write.

If you get the chance, listen to the podcast Unemployed and Afraid with Kim Kerten. Her personal experience and interviews with others who have been brave and faced towards their true north, weathered the storms and found their way to hobbies and careers that reflect who they want to be. I won’t forget again. The words are what matter to me. It is a gift to know this. I will hone in on my true north. The road will be there even if it’s not paved with gold.

One foot in front of the other. One word at a time.