How to kill your adventurous spirit.
Act two.
Podéis encontrar una versión de esta historia en castellano aquí.
Thorir and I in Madrid. He set up an impromptu wine tasting because he is just that skilled.
In my previous post, which you can find here, I talked about how doctors think about changing careers but don’t for many reasons, including a shortage of adventurous spirit. Another of the answers that stood out in my little survey was, “I lack the skills to be something else”. One spends so much time learning to save lives that suddenly learning to be a party planner seems quite scary (and I am not being sarcastic).
I would like to be a writer. But for the longest time, I was sure I lacked enough darkness in my soul to tap into for inspiration. One reads about famous writers, and sometimes, you feel you must have some kind of torment to be creative. Penelope Lively convinced me otherwise in her short story “ A World of Her Own”, included in Pack of Cards, Stories (1986).
All these musings have me pondering on skills and how the workforce is set the wrong way since a CV will never be able to reflect the many abilities one might be hiding. Also, they got me thinking about darkness and creativity and how 100% of the people I enjoy being with are a blast, very ingenious, and totally emotionally stable. I am pretty sure most of them would make great party planners, skilled pet manicurists and competent enough CEOs should they decide to take the plunge. For example, my friend Thorir, up there in the picture with me, is an expert in colorectal cancer. He also wants to be the prime minister of his home country, and he is moonlighting by smuggling wine to Iceland. That an oncologist finds the time to smoothly avoid Icelandic authorities and make a small profit from smuggling is, in my books, prime minister material. But he cannot put that on his CV (and I might have just blown his cover; if so, Thorir, I will visit you in jail).
If one talks about emotional stability, one needs to throw romantic relationships into the mix. In my late teens and early twenties, I was convinced that passion could only spring from torment. That all-consuming type of love that feels like you don’t fit in your skin, where you constantly thirst for the other’s presence, that burns fast but leaves no embers to keep you warm, where you are so much into the other person that you forget to be yourself. It can be thrilling at 20, feels stupid at 30, and is plain boring at 40. This brings me to step 2 of my journey of killing my adventurous spirit. Buckle up.
Step two- practice
Je t’aime- A story about bohemia.
Picture by María José Bosch Campos
When I was twenty-one, I decided I wanted to learn French. That summer, I got a job in Paris, and whilst I toiled away with meaningless spreadsheets during the week, I dedicated body and soul to being “Parisian” during the weekends.
On Saturday evenings, I met a friend to drink wine and eat cheese by the canal Saint-Martin. I walked around in my whackiest clothes, feeling utterly fashionable (I was not), and I talked with a lot of French people. No, let me correct that: I flirted with a lot of French men.
I met him on one of my Saturday night outings, and he was the epitome of Frenchness, or really, he embodied all my bohemian clichés. He was impossibly handsome, living off social benefits in a rented studio in Montmartre and wanted to be a writer. It took a while for me to understand that “I want to be a writer” in French means “I don’t study, and I don’t work, I have no career prospects and no plan for the future other than sitting in my apartment and smoke weed with my friends”. He was perfect, and my French was really bad.
Now, writers read a lot. That the only book I found in his studio was a biography of Michael Jackson should have been a warning sign of his plans with writing, but I was in love.
The summer ended, and we decided our fling had to be transformed into a long-distance relationship. Back then I was into having bad ideas and following through with them.
There we were, two broke twenty-year-olds trying to meet every so often but living 900 km apart. How could we bridge the gap and pay for high-velocity trains? Selling my body for scientific experimentation was the obvious way to cash in. At the University I studied there was a line of clinical research where they recruited healthy individuals to do pharmacokinetic studies on generic drugs before commercialisation. They paid students what seemed a small fortune for participation. I enrolled. I took drug X. I was paid. I was good to go. I lie, while all of this was happening I was knitting a scarf for him. Let’s stop here for a moment and roll our eyes together.
I used that “small fortune” to pay for a trip for both of us to Salamanca. On the way there, I envisioned a romantic weekend of tapas and torrid love. The afternoon we got there, he was already complaining of a toothache that only got worse as time went by. Apparently, the French subsidy does not cover dental care. Strike one.
On another occasion, I went to see him in Paris. I funded that train ticket, saving from my meagre funds. I spent that weekend cooking Spanish omelette for him and his friends because all he could afford was potatoes and eggs and because “Ana, your tortilla is so delicious”. So, while they rolled joints, I peeled potatoes. Strike two.
Granted that, in between, I had a blast. But memory is funny that way, because I do not recall the fun bits with the clarity I recall the crappy ones. Thanks to this relationship I also found out that weed does not affect me other than to give me a dry mouth, so maybe I did not have as much fun as he did. And I wonder if Taylor Swift would have the genius to write a heartbreak song including dental care, potato peeling and marihuana.
The bottom line of this story is that I did not stay around for strike three because practice, my little grasshoppers, makes masters. At twenty-one, I had already figured out that health insurance can be really romantic and that rolling the perfect joint is not a skill you write on your CV.
Rolling joints is not a survival skill either, but if you want to learn about proper survival, I got you covered. Stay tuned for the final act of this story.
Step 3- Master.
This is when the shit really hits the fan, or, as we say in Spain, the blood reaches the river.
Super funny. You could have a second career as a writer. Thanks for sharing!
I hear the "I have no other skills" all the time. And I must confess that I somewhat feel that way myself. I don't know if there is a lack of courage or a lack of imagination. Also, we spend so much of our training working for external validation (grades, recommendations, honors, grants) that maybe we lack a way of telling ourselves what is right.
Looking forward to act 3.
Nothing hotter than a bum! For as long as it lasts, anyway.
I think any career change is tough, especially if you spent such a long time in training. It also teaches you (falsely) that it requires a million certificates/degrees/whatever before you can do a job, so that might make a switch even more daunting?
Also, yikes @ 'the blood hits the river' haha, the true crime version of 'shit hits the fan'.