I am looking for a meaningful way to spend my days. Though it would have been easier just to stay there, I left my job at UCSF because I have this need to do more than that job was allowing me to do. It's time for a challenge. I have this energy and knowledge and experience that I can put to good use, somewhere. Now I just need to figure out where that is.
Of course, I feel like I should be standing on a mountaintop dispensing wisdom, and if I could figure out how to turn that into a paying gig, I would do it. Perhaps there is a website called "weneedgurus.org" that has the mountains and provides benefits, but I haven't come across it. I know something will revel itself in time. Patience is the key; but it is a quality I have never had in any great measure.
Really though, what makes me think I have so much to offer? I am past middle age, I have a checkerboard resume that doesn't include the twenty years of experience that really shaped me. How do I convey that the experiences I had and the things I learned raising Maggie are the very things that make me a valuable asset to a company. The workplace doesn't appreciate motherhood in its purest form and could not possibly understand the version I had. So what makes me the guru? Swagger? Confidence? Delusion?
Perhaps all three.
My friend Elizabeth posted this opinion piece from David Brooks of the New York Times yesterday. I suppose it's just a literary version of "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." but it really spoke to me. The perspective I acquired because of raising and losing -- especially losing - Maggie is the very thing that makes me think I am that guru. It's worth a read.
What Suffering Does
What Suffering Does
