In My Prime

It seems like I end up reinventing myself in prime years. I think, at the start of life, everyone does that. Age thirteen is the start of that gray zone where you begin in earnest to move from childhood towards adulthood. You hit nineteen and find yourself embarking on the first truly official adult years. Starting from there, some people find niches and settle into them. Sometimes settling is appropriate. Sometimes it isn’t, but need and fear can prevent a person from moving on.

And yet other times people keep moving on, keep transitioning, keep inventing and reinventing themselves. Again, sometimes moving on is appropriate. Other times moving on comes from need or fear. In my case I think it came from a sense of aimlessness. So let’s put me in the “need” category – I needed to find a goal to work toward.

At twenty-three I had a useless psychology degree. I obtained paralegal certification. I moved on to a job that used none of my psych and some of my paralegal. I stayed for too long.

At thirty-seven I had been living for weekends. I worked so I could do what I liked to do on weekends. I liked working with animals. I liked volunteering for the local zoo. I became a fairly important volunteer at the local zoo. I became involved with the touring, education, nutrition, scientific observation studies at the zoo. The more involved I become, the more disenchanted I became with my “real life”.

Events herded me into veterinary school. I cannot claim it was my decision to go to vet school. While I liked the compliments (boy, you must be really smart to have gotten in) and the sense of pride that goes with getting introduced as “Dr. Salamander”, I mostly went along with the flow because I didn’t think I’d really make the grade. It was a chance to try, fail, get it out of my system, and move on. I never thought I’d graduate. So for the better part of a decade I was reinvented from paralegal to student. I’ve always been a good student. I was just never good at planning for graduation.

So graduation came and I was reinvented again. And at forty-three I found I was reinventing myself in ways I hadn’t envisioned. In addition to entering the world of medicine on the doctor side, Dr. Salamander had also had her first initiation into the world of medicine from the patient end (at age forty-one). As patient and doctor I had stepped out into the next decade. I got a job I never envisioned having when I decided to go for my veterinary degree. At forty-three I got divorced from the husband that everyone but me thought was perfect, found someone who was a little less “perfect”, but a much better fit. I went from a person who preferred dogs to a “cat person“, and settled down. I was happy, thought I’d found my niche and was in the process of feathering it.

You who have followed me for the last eight years have been witness to the slow unfolding of dissatisfaction I’ve had with my job. What I hadn’t appreciated was the dissatisfaction the job had with me. We’ve changed our method of doing executive reviews at work. The criteria they use are items that I cannot change (the results of a personality test we all had to take; my results say I am entirely mismatched with my job‘s profile) or can change only by moving mountains (people essentially get to vote on how much they like the job you’re doing; my job is to find out what is being done wrong and get it fixed, so guess how popular I was on that one). The results of the review mean I have a limited time to improve or find other employment. So this newly minted prime-number of fifty-three as of Wednesday finds me on the precipice of reinvention yet again.

I feel like a caterpillar who metamorphs into more caterpillars.