Lesson #20: It's Not About Finding Yourself...

I think I've spent the better part of my 20s and 30s on a quest to discover who I truly am. This involved several protracted stints in Europe, the unparalleled boot camp that is New York City (I'm now a veteran of three tours of duty), performing arts school, medical school, a brief dalliance as Peggy Olsen minus the martinis, only to be revisited decades later during another brief dalliance in ad school. I've been a scientist, a doctor, an opera singer, an English teacher, a translator, a copywriter, a grant writer, a professional actress (yeah, I'm on IMDB), a nanny, a bar maid, an administrative assistant, a software developer, a saleswoman, a TV producer, and so on and so forth...it's really quite staggering when you think about it. And think about it I do. Why so many iterations? Why all the sturm und drang and confusion? Just how many careers is it possible for one person to have in one short lifetime? I know I bore easily, but what is it about me that constantly drives me to reinvent myself? One part challenge, one part dissatisfaction, equal measures of Jewish angst and the sense that it all goes by so fast so you might as well try to be everything, if only to say that you did. I sat next to a charming retired couple from rural North Carolina on my flight today. We bonded over the drunken boor in the row behind us brandishing his corporate AMEX and threatening to buy all the pretty girls drinks. It was 10 am. It turned out that the husband had been in sales his whole life and was now returning to school to study nursing and certify as a paramedic. He said he had always been fascinated by the human body and probably should have gone to medical school. Funny, I often muse that I should have gotten my MBA. No matter, at 65 he was at the top of his class, outshining the young nurses and putting his classmates to shame. It was inspiring, really. He plans to take his newfound knowledge on the road and volunteer at medical clinics in Guatemala. Another bonding moment as that was where I learned Spanish just after my first year of medical school. When I returned home, beaten down by the chaos and upstream battle that is New York, I noticed my very own fridge magnet, acquired during a recent fit of soul searching at a Brooklyn paper shop: "Life isn't about finding yourself; Life is about creating yourself." I couldn't agree more.