doing my thing

"Why aren't you a history teacher?" my hairstylist asked me a couple of weeks ago, as I sat in her chair, showing her pictures (in a book) of Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, and Richard Nixon, & telling her stuff about them.
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Why aren't I a history teacher?
?
Same reason I am not a professional ice skater, or waitress, or boat salesperson. I never aimed for those things.

At Boston University my minor was American History (major, English literature).
Why did I not select Teaching as a career?
Didn't want to, at the time.
Maybe I have more tendencies now, in conversation, that the listener sometimes takes to be "teaching" which I only consider to be sharing something kind of cool and interesting. Just offering / sharing thoughts and info...is how I mean it. Intend it.

Come to think of it, I've been "accused" of teaching, at work, by people who didn't want to "learn stuff" during their break:
"Go away!" ...

It made me think, and consider: when I graduated with a B.A. (bachelor of arts), I had been in school for 17 of the 22 years I'd been alive -- K-12 plus four years at B.U. The school-experience was generally good, for me: I couldn't be categorized as a girl who "didn't like school," yet some of it was boredom -- waiting for things to be over -- and I wanted to be out-on-my-own, go-go-go, out in the "real world," whatever that is.

(One could make the argument, some days, that the real world is overrated. Like the old story where John Kennedy was campaigning for congress (house or senate) in Massachusetts -- standing at the factory gates shaking hands with workers as they went in, in the early morning, one man was overheard to challenge the candidate from the wealthy family -- "I hear you never worked a day in your life!" While Kennedy took a few seconds to select an answer the guy followed up with, "Let me tell you, y' haven't missed a thing." lol )

Real world. Yeah.
I thought of law school, only briefly.
("Do I want to be in school for three more years?"
At that point, I didn't.
And -- "Does the world need another lawyer?")
I took the LSAT. (There you are, back in a room, taking a test with a bunch of other kids. Or rather, grown-ups. Sort of. Barely.)
And my LSAT score was good enough that I could have got into law school.

I can vaguely remember the mixed feeling of --
I did well enough on the test -- Success; and
at the same time -- I don't want to go to law school right now. Or ever.
Moving toward realizing what you want,
by learning what you don't want.

I wanted to -- work. To go out into the world and do a good job, get money, and accomplish something and find some type of success.
(My optimism and positive-thinking and general excitement was "running amok," I think...!)
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And what I wanted to do, since I was about 8, maybe, was "be a writer."
And then, in adult life, it was like -- 'I can sit down and write books after I make enough money. Later. Sometime. Maybe.' And -- 'it's too hard to find success in that area, too many people doing it, too much rejection.'

I sort of allowed myself to be intimidated away from What I Really Wanted To Do.
Now that I am eight hundred and fourteen years old, I see, and feel inside of myself, that that was bullshit.

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