What do I really want
to do?
I don’t know. I’ve
never really known. If you had asked me, when I was a little kid, what I wanted
to be when I grew up, I would not have had an answer for you. I suppose if you
had really pressed me on it, I may’ve said something like a policeman, a fireman,
or astronaut. Not that I actually wanted to be any of those things, but those
were the answers I had heard to that question. I can’t really remember anyone
asking me that as a kid. They must have, right? That’s what adults ask
kids. Anyway...
Later, as a teen, I
didn’t have any strong feeling about a career. At some point, I thought maybe I
could be a therapist. That may have been when I was in therapy. But, again, it
wasn’t like a burning desire within me. I was writing music by that point, and
I guess I liked it, so I started college as a music composition major. But even
then, I don’t think I saw that as what I really wanted to be. It was just
something that I did. I ended up switching to psychology, as I thought it was
something I could maybe stand to do, but I continued studying composition as
well.
I never had a plan.
Literally no one ever asked me what was my career plan. I never even heard terms
like “5-year plan” or “10-year plan” until later when I was working at some
schools. It really seems like someone, a teacher or an advisor sometime during high
school or college, should have asked me that. Should have asked me what I
wanted to do with my life. But I don’t remember that ever happening. And I’m
pretty sure my parents never asked. Maybe I seemed like one of those students
who did well, so everyone just assumed I had my act together in terms of a
career path. But obviously I didn’t.
There was some point,
I think maybe my fourth year in college, when I was aware that I didn’t really
know what I was doing, and I thought I might actually quit school for a bit and
try to figure things out. But the few people that I talked to about that told
me it was a bad idea and that I should finish a degree in something, anything,
whatever I was the closest to finishing at that point. So, I stuck around
another year (+) and got a degree in psychology, with a gigantic minor in
music. I had more music hours than psych hours, but undergrad psychology is a
pretty easy degree, and undergrad music is not. (Sometimes, when people find
out I have a psychology degree, they’ll ask if I ever use it. And I’ll say, “Sure!
I work with crazy people all the time - singers, dancers, actors.”)
I ended up playing
music for a living. It wasn’t really a choice I made because that was what I
wanted to be. It’s just something that started when I was in college. My composition
teacher told me, “Go play in jazz band, it’ll be good for you. Go play for
dance classes, it’ll be good for you. Go accompany the opera, it’ll be good for
you.” He meant those things would be good for me as a composer, and they
definitely were. But I also discovered I could play music and people would pay
me money for it. And that was nice, so that’s what I did. It just sort of
happened. And accompanying led to doing musical theater, and that led to being
an assistant music director and then music director. Once again, I don’t think
it that was something I decided I wanted to be, it just sort of happened.
So, I’m a freelance
musician, and it’s hard to make a decent living at that. Especially if you
don't feel a really strong drive to keep working at it because it’s really what
you love doing. I still write music – sometimes classical stuff, sometimes
theatre. I’ve never seen a way to really make money at that unless I were
writing pop music for famous pop stars or big budget film scores, and I’m not
actually interested in writing either of those kinds of things. About 10 or 12
years ago I started taking pictures. I like doing that, and I wish I could do
it more. But even though every now and then people have paid me for photos, I
don't see a way to regularly make money at it, at least not with the sort of
pictures that I take and want to take. Anyway, I don’t know if that’s what I “want
to be.”
Now, I’m approaching
old age. I turned 50 a few years ago and I have no money, no savings, not much
of anything. I’m really just scraping by. It’s not like I spend money unwisely.
It’s that I don’t really have money to spend in the first place. I’m not
starving, or unable to pay the bills. But I don’t have a safety net nor a
retirement plan. Several times in the past 15 or so years I have thought about
maybe trying to find a “normal” job – a non-music job. But I’m not even sure
what jobs there are out in the world. And, while there are some skills I have
developed as a musician and music director, I’m not sure how they would
translate to the normal job market. I’ve never been any good at convincing
people to do things for me, so how do I convince someone to hire me with no
background in a normal work environment?
If you were to ask me
now, what is it that I really want to do?
Nothing? I don’t know. I’ve never really known.
