Some people know what they want to “be” very early in their lives. Then, they work toward that goal in terms of education, volunteer work, and other stepping stones to that “dream job”. If they’re lucky (one supposes), they stay in that type of work – or some version of it – all their lives and then eventually retire from that.
Others, like I, are different. I never really had a sense of anything specific I wanted to “be”. Well, I did want to be an astronaut and then a professional wrestler, but I never dreamed I could be the first one and was disillusioned by the second when I found that it was all staged. Damn.
However, by the time I was getting near the end of my undergraduate degree, I realized that I truly loved history and thought that I might want to pursue an academic career. So I obtained a master’s degree from the University of Alberta in that discipline and was then accepted to the Ukrainian history PhD program at the University of Toronto.
However, in its acceptance letter, U of T bluntly told me that they have no scholarship or bursary money for me and that I was unlikely to get a job in my field anyway, so I’d better think hard if I really want to go that route.
Didn’t have to think too hard about it at all when I decided to let that fall by the wayside in the wake of that advice.
However, I did have the good fortune of obtaining some work as a contract historian in what was then called Alberta Culture and Multiculturalism. I did a bunch of research work for the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village outside of Edmonton, AB and a major survey of all the remaining Ukrainian churches in east central Alberta. All this was used (and is still used, which is very gratifying) to help portray Ukrainian pioneer life in that part of the world.
I absolutely loved it and did it for about three-and-a-half years. Alas, though, it wasn’t steady and paid quite poorly, so I found myself having to move on to other things. Which is a shame, because I think I would have enjoyed doing that kind of work for the rest of my employed days.
How many of us end up doing what we truly love? And how many of us end up settling for what we have to do in order to make a living? For me, I was fortunate in some ways that I had more than one career because I learned things that I might not otherwise have had a chance to learn. But I’ll always wonder what my life might have been like if I’d gotten to do something I really loved all the way through.