The Pivot
I’m one of those people. I rehearse. I practice. I study. I read, ask questions. So it takes me a while to reach the larger questions one might be confronted with at various stages of their life. Since 2015, I’ve contemplated a career change. For years I’ve tried for a balance of passions, like the tramps of Robert Frost’s poem Two Tramps in Mud Time, the pertinent stanza below:
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future’s sakes.
Which is to say, I attempted to unite “my avocation and my vocation,” to such a deft degree the two would be inseparable. Fair to middling success on my part, to meld the life of a writer with the job of teaching writing for a living. (Yes, it’s a mouthful). I taught in order that I could write. I ended up doing it from 2000 until this week.
I love/d teaching, especially teaching young people to see themselves as writers, as capable of writing. But a living it is not, unequivocally, especially for the academic/writer, which is to say someone like myself who did not teach in public schools. I taught students pell-mell and part time in universities in Texas, Missouri, Kansas, and Delaware. And I was very good at it. I know, as anyone knows when they do a good job. But for the past five years, I’ve yearned to do something else. I called it the pivot. Not terribly original to be honest, but there it is.
I had a couple of career paths to explore, post-teaching, things I felt a deep attraction to for various reasons. Those two were: become a Jungian Analyst or an End of Life Doula. As you can guess my choices are not financial, but cerebral, and yet, spiritual too.
As a lifelong Jungian aficionado, I began to explore becoming an analyst in 2015, and then again recently in 2019, discovering while it is a rigorous process, it is both very expensive and lengthy. To even begin study, prospects must undergo 100 hours of Jungian analysis at their own expense, and analysts usually charge $250 an hour (as they should). I couldn’t afford that, even when some analysts agreed to “work with me,” on the cost. But it was also the sheer length of study that was laid out before me that was a little too daunting considering I’d just finished in 2009 my doctorate capping off twelve years of post-secondary education. So it was off the table. I would continue my autodidactic engagement with Jung, but would not enter into a formal education.
Running parallel to my interest in Jungian psychology was the practice of death doulas. End of Life Doulas help clients, their family and caregivers with the emotional, spiritual, and qualitative aspects of dying. I have found myself thinking about the practice since around 2003 when I read an article in the New York Times about a volunteer who sat with a dying man because there were no friends or family available. Deaths in my own family and my own spirituality and worldview made becoming a death doula something more than idle contemplation.
I’ve so far successfully taken and passed a university certificate course in being a death doula, or End of Life Doula, and I am currently finishing a very rigorous program of training from the Tiffany of doula education, the International End of Life Doula Association. I hope to begin practice in the new year. My specialty will be life reviews — legacy projects, memoir, vigils — through my business: Story | End of Life Doula.
..And, I continue to write, most days. I am a writer always, first and foremost. Pieces will continue to be published — several on the horizon from Agon Journal and Map Literary to name a few — and books too, my novella The Smallest Universe is to come out in 2021 by Propertius Press.
