work and defining oneself

i think a lot about words. and how the way they're (mis)used shapes the culture around us. as i've been working on my scandinavian welfare state book, i've encountered countless interesting linguistic turns of phrase. for example, it seems that we can no longer refer to our work as a job, it must be a career. every "course" designed to help the unemployed get back to work is called something with career - the career way, the career cannon, and the like. even if the job it leads to is cleaning hotel rooms or sitting at the cash register in a grocery store or stocking shelves in a warehouse. those are now careers. and i think it diminishes the word "career" to call every job by that name. because where does it leave us when we want to refer to work that requires years of education and work experience, built up over a long period? 

but the tendency to refer to all jobs as a career reveals something about the way culture views work. it's everything. it's THE defining feature of a person. when you meet someone new, one of the first questions is always, "what do you do?" and how they view you hinges on that question. we are our work in the eyes of others. which is why everyone needs a career and not just a job. because if i have just a job, then who am i?

i've been working very hard for several years now to NOT be my job. back when i was my job, i wasn't much of anything else. i certainly wasn't much of a mother or wife and i definitely wasn't creative or energetic, i barely remembered who i was. i was just a corporate drone, giving all of my energy to a company that ultimately didn't give a rats' ass. because companies don't care about anything. they can't. it's impossible. but in trying to be my job, i forgot who i really was. and i think that's happening to an awful lot of people.

ink spiller wrote yesterday about being a working woman and i think that's part of the problem. women came into the workplace on male presumptions, trying to fit into a male world, not accounting for their uniquely feminine strengths. however, i think it's only part of the picture, as i've seen female-dominated workplaces that are just as dysfunctional as male-dominated ones and frankly, i'd take the male-dominated kind any day (there's usually (but not always) less crying in meetings). 

i think we have to make it ok again for people to have jobs which provide them with an income, but which don't define them as humans. not every job has to be a career. sometimes it's ok to just have a job. because you find your self-definition elsewhere - in puttering around your garden, in making meaningful handmade gifts for people you love, in making dinner for your family, in daily writing or reading, in spending time with a horse, in laughing at the antics of the chickens (just to name the things i do). maybe you hunt or forage or go to taekwando or a knitting group. 

who we are is the big collection of all of the things we do. i write and i take pictures and i have begun to teach and i do research. but i also cook and plan parties and serve on boards and laugh and entertain and sew and learn new things. i am far too complex to boil it all down to one word that happens to have to do with where i work. and i suspect all of you are too. 

let's take back work. and take back ourselves in the process.