Breathe
By Barbara Anderson
-Quickly, you must tell the camera who you are... "I am..."
With the speed she does everything in her life Steph Lewis - the mastermind behind this talent-packed platform where - dropped that phrase to me to say in a video to be used in a future campaign.
Maybe she didn't notice but I started by saying 'journalist', 'editor', then 'generous'... until my son Bruno -who was being nosy in the session- interrupted and told me that I had to put the accent on the letter 'o' in the word yo and tell the truth "mom: say you're funny".
Who am I, a profession or a personality trait? What is more powerful in my life?
Minutes before, the photographer summoned for this project, a talented young woman I know from when I went through the adventure/adventure of La-Lista/The Guardian, asked me while putting a new battery in her camera: "and now where are you working? what are you doing? " "I'm not in any fixed place: I collaborate in Expansion, Opinion 51, I run my own disability news site 'Yo También' and I've been writing some books...".
I realized that, as I named each of these chambas chambasI was lowering my voice with a certain sense of failure. And I thought "of course, since I am not in any corporate, in any physical space where I am part of a permanent staff, I feel that everything else that carries my signature is not so valuable.
It was an epiphany. What I do is not minor, but it seems minor if it is not attached to a brand (which is not my personal brand), to a corporate that involves me.
I have dedicated 81,000 hours to my profession - which, unlike other professions, has no weekends and little vacation time - since I published my first job until now.
Not having a badge made me feel like I was in the wrong place.
It seems that it is not enough to say that one is a journalist, but immediately what matters much more is where?
Has it happened to them in their careers?
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A few days ago, a friend of mine, who is a senior executive in a Mexican multinational company, told me that in a conversation with her mentor, he asked her what her hobby was, what she did beyond her family and work. "I didn't know what to answer, because I have been so focused on meeting, exceeding goals, doing everything and more at home and at my job that at what point do I have a chance of a hobby or any other activity?", she told me between puzzled and empty at her more than fifty years of age. The same company that asks her every quarter for results "citius, altius, fortius", the same one that now wants her back in the office without strange things like the 'hybrid model' because the pandemic is over, is the one that does not understand that she has not found something else that she is passionate about and to which she devotes her time when with anguish she manages to finish all the projects stealing hours from her home, her husband and her son.
Now she has set a goal to see more films, to force herself to add movies to her schedule so that she has something to answer in her next interview and not be labeled 'boring' or 'less complete'.
I listened to her and realized that not feeling alone in these dilemmas is a significant and worthy consolation. It is not 'evil of many, consolation of few', but it gave me an extra perspective: neither does it guarantee anything or give more satisfaction to be under a mega brand sign, with badge and email with corporate signature after the "arroba".
"At least you know how to knit...I don't even know how to knit," she said, thinking that I devote afternoons of solace and recreation to the stamens. I relieved her by acknowledging that I have long been unable to do anything 'off kids' and 'day to day pending' that includes a pair of needles.
I just told her a phrase I heard at a conference for parents of children with disabilities and how to be encouraged to live a 'non-standard' reality. "When the music changes, the dance changes," I told her, "it's just that sometimes we become deaf and don't want to hear that the same rhythm is no longer playing or we don't dare to try new steps, to step out of the norm."
I told her over coffee and she nodded understanding that it happens and it is important to 'read it in everyone', but I realized that I should make that same recommendation to myself.
That it would not make me feel embarrassed or devalued to say, when asked "what do you do now?", that I had 'only' written two books in less than a year (in an international publishing house that receives 500 manuscripts a week and publishes only 1000 titles a year), that every day I run a website that receives 60 thousand visits a month or that I research and write opinion columns for other media. Not to mention the thousands of domestic roles that I would be boring to list but that also happen in stereo.
Many of the things I've done, what I've accomplished, were meant to make my parents proud. Getting a promotion or getting 'the' most amazing story meant hearing their voice congratulating me.
Today none of them are there. And I have found myself in the last few months since my mother died, automatically dialing her phone and cutting off at the first ring, because there is no one to answer the phone in that house.
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I love the analyses made by The School of Life, an institute dedicated to understanding and improving our emotional intelligence, founded by philosopher Alain de Botton.
In his latest book "The career workbook" he discusses the issue and analyzes that our career crises are enhanced by the feeling that our talents are not real unless: a) they make us money, b) we extract them full time and c) they are not just hobbies. What de Botton says is that work has become that role where our talents and skills meet the needs of the world, what we want above all is meaningful work, which means one that alleviates suffering or enhances the pleasure of other people.
Do we really do what we feel? What are the jobs that others do that make us envious and why?
The book invites us all to keep a 'Diary of Envy', where we write down the names and tasks that others are doing and that we would love to do ourselves. And even another list, another diary, with the work being done by the people we would most like to see fail.
The School of Life reflects in this book on our childhood interests, that which we answered when we were asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, because that is answered from a stage where we are free of the two great anxieties that boycott our craziest projects: the need for money and the yearning for status.
"True success can mean, at age 50, having returned in a key way to what we loved at age five: doing something fun. That's why we tend to be so catastrophically modest about what we deserve to achieve."
Perhaps, put this way, it will be easier to identify what makes us happy, what completes us in every way, what makes us say (with an accent on O, as my son recommends) I AM, -besides the badges I have hung and will ever hang, what I have signed and will ever sign- "a fun person".
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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