“My goal is …I’d like a career or something.”
Sammy Gray, Realty Bites
Loaded with everything I owned, my Chevy Nova pulled way from the blue house on 2nd Street for the last time. My newly minted college diploma was packed, but the degree it conferred had not produced a job. Without a career, grad school, or even a new apartment on the horizon, I headed for home. As I drove up I-81, a sense of emptiness rose to the surface. Throughout our senior year, I played a number of roles in that blue house: VCR programmer of Seinfeld recordings, divider of the phone bill, Lelaina Pierce style documentarian two years prior to Realty Bites. Over the past four years, these roles and others had come to define who I was. With college now in the rear view window, these pieces of my identity were as obsolete as my B.A. in philosophy. Overwhelmed with this new existence and since I had no where to be, I did what seemed most productive at the time: I pulled over to the side of the road and took a nap.
Arriving at my childhood home delivered no more clarity or direction. The setting was familiar, but so much else has changed. My parents had finalized their divorce and both had moved away from the colonial house on Westfield Drive. In a few months, the house would be put on the market. My sister’s best friend, Erin, was now living in my older sister’s room. It was like we used to be a popular 80s family sitcom–with most of the original cast gone, we were now living out some second rate spin-off. Sleeping in my childhood bed, I was in my home, but clearly not at home.
Predictably, I desperately tried to hold onto any portion of the college experience I just had. I would lay in bed and listen to the soundtrack of the last four years. I wore out camcorder tapes of our senior year shenanigans. When a college friend announced he was having a birthday party in Baltimore, I jumped at the chance to drive five hours to drink beer, play frisbee, and crash on his living room floor. I had lost a huge part of me. I could still blast Achtung Baby in my car, but it wouldn’t be on a 2am run to Hardees. If I wasn’t a college student, who was I?
I spent the summer avoiding thinking about my future self and instead revisited past versions of Steve. I returned to the summer camp I had worked during college. I showed the camp director my new college degree, but it didn’t get me a raise. I hung out with a skeleton crew of high school friends only now we didn’t have to hide any drinking from our parents. One was planning a wedding. One had an offer from a Big 6 accounting firm and was able to purchase a “real car.” Another would eventually wind up at grad school. While I was comfortable falling back into the familiarity of those friendships, it was obvious they had more plans than I did. Getting married, a degree in public health, or a car not held together with duck tape were all legitimate things to aspire to. Yet, I was just trying to figure out where I could do laundry once my parents sold the house.
One night, while a friend was in town for some holiday-type occasion, I had dinner at his parents’ house. He was clerking for a judge in DC and on his way to law school the following year. (Obviously he had more of plan after college and probably didn’t nap during his post graduation drive.) His parents had always been invested in me, and over his mom’s corn chowder we discussed my future. Somewhat magically, it came to me. Feeling some sort of imaginary spotlight on me, I looked up and I shared my revelation with the group.
“I think I want to be teacher.”
It was a simple sentence, but a powerful idea. And I’m sure it didn’t come to me completely instantaneously. Somewhere between drinking Zima/Midori cocktails (It was a thing, trust me) and beating seven year olds at Nok Hockey, I had done some thinking about me. Working summer camp was a big part of getting into teaching–I learned I liked kids and they, for the most part, liked me back. While it wasn’t the job I was looking for after college, that stupid red camp t-shirt led me to my first career.
In my twenties, being a teacher was the most important thing in my life. I spent an inordinate amount of hours at school–planning lessons and grading papers. When I got bored I would play kickball or basketball with the after-school kids. The teacher role of “Mr. Matsumoto” was a huge part of my identity and one I still consider part of me. Somewhere between that nap on 1-81 and an elementary school in Kendall Park, NJ, I had found myself.
This notion of identity loss and gain was crystalized for me recently by my friend Chloe. Catching up over a cup of coffee, she described a twelve month span in which she lost her job, got divorced, and parted ways with a teenage girl whom she had essentially raised. She spoke very eloquently about being stripped of these titles: employee, wife, and mother. She used the term “pillars” to describe these roles and how they propped her up her identity. Once these support columns were removed, the current version of herself came crashing down. She had lost her sense of self as well as how she was viewed by others. Without the familial titles, she was unwelcome among her former flock of soccer moms. As much as it broke my heart to hear her talk about it, I could tell she was back on the road to figuring out who she is. (If I had the recipe for the prophetic corn chowder, I certainly would have shared it with her.)
As sturdy as these pillars can be, they don’t always stand forever. I left the classroom in New Jersey to sell real estate in California. Becoming a husband and then a father created my life’s greatest roles and adventures. Recently switching real estate brokerages made me into a new-guy-at-work which I hadn’t been in awhile. Will “real estate broker” always be a part of my identity? I think so, but if not, I’ll always have that philosophy degree to fall back on.
