Before I quit my job to start school, I had worked in what I'll call the book industry for about 20 years. I got my first bookstore job in the summer of 1989, after my freshman year of college. With the exception of a few brief periods totalling about a year & a half where I worked at a clothing store, a record store, & as a full-time art class model, I worked in bookstores until 2001. Then I worked in publishing, then back to a bookstore, then back to publishing until now, 2010. I never felt like my identity was tied up in my job, but I have realized that, in a way, it was. Not with any specific job, but part of how I thought about myself was as someone who worked with books. The world of books & reading has always been a huge part of my existence. I'm the younger of two children & I can remember realizing that everyone in the house could read...except me. And it killed me! So I learned as fast as I could & I haven't slowed down since. Working with books seemed the most natural career for me to have because reading was definitely the thing I spent most of my spare time doing. And it still is.
When you tell people that you work with books, they seem to assume, right or wrong, that you're smart. They at least assume that you read. So I considered the possible change in people's perception of me when I decided to make this move. About 98% of the time when I told someone I was planning to go to beauty school, they said, "That's perfect!" or "I can totally see you doing that!" or things of that nature. But two people responded in the way that I feared. One of them said something like, "Hunh...THAT'S what you want to do?" with the implication that it was a strange move for me. The other person (a very smart woman, I should add), actually said,"You're too smart for that." She backtracked pretty quickly & admitted that the stylists in the salon where we both went were all very smart & quite well-educated people. But I had seen what her first response was. In a nutshell: that's not a career for smart people. Which I then extrapolate to: when people meet me, will they not think I'm smart anymore? It seems a funny brand of shallowness for me to worry about this, but I do.
When you tell people that you work with books, they seem to assume, right or wrong, that you're smart. They at least assume that you read. So I considered the possible change in people's perception of me when I decided to make this move. About 98% of the time when I told someone I was planning to go to beauty school, they said, "That's perfect!" or "I can totally see you doing that!" or things of that nature. But two people responded in the way that I feared. One of them said something like, "Hunh...THAT'S what you want to do?" with the implication that it was a strange move for me. The other person (a very smart woman, I should add), actually said,"You're too smart for that." She backtracked pretty quickly & admitted that the stylists in the salon where we both went were all very smart & quite well-educated people. But I had seen what her first response was. In a nutshell: that's not a career for smart people. Which I then extrapolate to: when people meet me, will they not think I'm smart anymore? It seems a funny brand of shallowness for me to worry about this, but I do.
