A good chunk of my life is over. In fact, if I'm at the midpoint, then I'm going to have an enviable lifespan—and the guys in my family generally don't have enviable lifespans. Divorced, laid-off and living far from my New England homeland, I've reaped the fruits of my errors over the last half-decade. Several months ago I said to myself, "I better get serious in a hurry." So I decided to become a high school English teacher.
I'll be qualified to stand before a classroom in about five months. One semester to go. Although I make a bit of money by writing copy for a few Australian websites in the retail space, I'm burning through my savings. The local press says that there will be a great need for secondary-level teachers in a few years, but it'll be competitive for a while; finding a permanent teaching gig isn't going to happen quickly.
But I feel like I have a fighting chance in education. That's a new feeling for me.
Truth be told, I stumbled into my career in marketing. After high school I joined the Navy and became a military journalist; my dream at the time was to be a filmmaker, and my recruiter told me that journalists worked around cameras quite a bit. So I ended up reading the news for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. The military seemed like the adventurous thing to do and, besides, I was way too much of a cut-up in high school to go to college—and I had the grades to prove it. After my hitch, I went on to the University of Massachuetts to pursue a degree in English. I earned good grades there.
While at UMass I held all sorts of odd jobs: bouncer, barback, courier and emergency room clerk, to name just a few. After I received my degree I simply went on to a slightly better administrative posting at the hospital where I'd been working. Children's Hospital, Boston, to be less vague. Got married. Then went from that slightly better admin job to a start-up internet company that one of the hospital's physicians had founded. Amongst a dozen or so M.I.T. and similar computer hotshots I was woefully out of place and got laid off for the first time since I started working in high school almost 20 years earlier. Ouch.
Not long after that my ex-wife and I discovered that she was pregnant. Yes, it was pretty scary hearing that I was to become a father while there were no paychecks coming in... especially since my biological father, whom I had not seen in almost a quarter century—nor would I ever see again—had been a huge failure. A massive failure. Colossal. We'll talk about that later. Anyway, I got lucky and landed a job that actually made use of my degree about two months after I was shown the door at the internet company. I would be working as an editorial assistant in the marketing/communications department of a large consulting firm.
A few years later I quit that job when my ex-wife and I decided to move to her native Australia. It took me the better part of a year to find a job once I hit these shores. Blessings were counted when I successfully landed a marketing manager gig six weeks after my second son was born. Yes, it was good to be working again, but marketing in Australia, I soon discovered, seemed to have more of an accent on sales rather than communications. The marketing job I had before I left the U.S. was pretty rare in that it was primarily focussed on the written word, so I always felt like an imposter when asked to do anything business-development related in Australia.
Fast forward a year after getting that job and my marriage is over. Three years after that and I'm thoroughly burnt out. I get another marketing job. Nine months later the Global Financial Crisis is in full swing and I fall in its path. Add another 11 months and half a Graduate Diploma in Education (Secondary) and here we are.
There's ad copy that needs to be written right now, and a book that I've been trying to birth for a few years. My writings here definitely fall under the "Procrastination" banner.
It's time to get things right.
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