Job, Career, Vocation?

[weeniegeniewife]

Vocation, hands-down, absolutely no question. I have known since junior high that I wanted to be a mental health therapist, and I've known since grad school that I wanted to be in private practice and own my own clinic. I am living my professional dream.

[GrayMatterWife]

Vocation, hands-down, absolutely no question. I have known since junior high that I wanted to be a mental health therapist, and I've known since grad school that I wanted to be in private practice and own my own clinic. I am living my professional dream.

OHOHOHOH!! Now I get your website "name"--ShrinkJamie! Got it! I thought that you were getting shorter or something... (kidding...I just wasn't sure what it meant).

You and DCJenn...you seemed to be drawn to your professions from a really early age.

[Michele]

I guess being a veterinarian is more of a vocation for me....but the clinic I'm currently at? Strictly a job and some days it's a damn crappy one.

[weeniegeniewife]

OHOHOHOH!! Now I get your website "name"--ShrinkJamie! Got it! I thought that you were getting shorter or something... (kidding...I just wasn't sure what it meant).

You and DCJenn...you seemed to be drawn to your professions from a really early age.

I "stole" that screen name from a psychiatrist I used to work with; his name was James, and he called himself Shrink Jim. I have called myself Shrink Jamie since before I went to grad school.

And at 5'10" without shoes on, I don't think I'm shrinking any time soon! At least not in the height category. I love it when my clients call me "shrink". We all get a good chuckle out of it.

[Rapunzel]

Vocation - absolutely. This is something that you must love and feel a spiritual prompting to do in order to make it through the seriously heavy work load. (By "this" I mean caring for six children and homeschooling five of them currently). In many ways being married to my husband is a vocation. LOL I love him and have very strong spiritual promptings in order to get through THAT seriously heavy work load as well. LOL

How would dh answer this? I don't know! I'll have to ask him! I know he would count his primary "vocation" as husband and father. That I'm pretty certain about.

[spotty_dog]

Funny, how one's vocation is not necessarily the calling that is the most natural fit.

If your passion in life were music, and you were willing to sacrifice anything and put in hours of hard work and practice because that was the field in which you had the *drive* to succeed? I'd say that music was your vocation, even if you had hardly any natural talent to speak of.

Likewise, most of the time I feel that my vocation is to be a homemaker. The whole kit and kaboodle, from raising and educating the kids to keeping house, cooking, gardening, preserving, decorating, creating practical and beautiful crafts. It all calls to me. I'm not particularly good at any of it, but I *care* enough to get better and to practice for years if that's what it takes. That's a passion I've never had for any other field. I was good at math and science when I was in school, and teachers fell all over themselves informing me of my "potential". Well, I never spent my free time working physics problems the way I pore over books on household organization and root cellaring. Like Kumar once said, "Just because you're hung like a moose doesnt mean you gotta do porn."

[DCJenn]

I think therapists, nurses, teachers and the like tend to know early on.

There is rarely a day when I think, "crap, I have to go to work today." I mean sure there are days when I desperately want a day off but that's more situational than anything else.

And, I'm also not in the trenches anymore either. I had an acquaintance who left nursing for Big Pharma and I asked her why and she said, "I'm not down with the poo anymore." That pretty much describes it for me- not down with the poo any more." That would be a job.

Jenn

Like Kumar once said, "Just because you're hung like a moose doesnt mean you gotta do porn."

Can I get that on a magnet?

[Vishenka69]

Finance has always been just a job for me. I went in it because one of us had to earn something. I really enjoyed working in the spirits industry but the corporate politics just got to me. What can I say, I'm passionate about drinking. I've been giving a lot of thought of doing something with that but haven't come up with an answer yet.

Ultimately I think I'm too lazy to really have a vocation or even a career. I'm not good at giving too much time or energy to any one specific thing. If there was a career track for sleeping in late, shopping, drinking and occasional cooking, I'd jump on that but for now I'm still in limbo.

I've always been jealous of people who knew what they wanted to do from a very young age, actively pursued it and are completely fulfilled by it.

[niener]

Like Kumar once said, "Just because you're hung like a moose doesnt mean you gotta do porn."

LOVE IT!

[mommax3]

What I do for money now is a job.

Mothering (especially) and making a home for my family is my vocation, although in order to find balance in my life, I also work outside the home.

I am very much a people person, and when my little "people" grew up and went to school, I had a hard time getting motivated to do anything at home.....the interaction with others motivates me. So, for 3 solid hours a day, I wrangle middle schoolers, teach them how to use their voices in a way that is semi-aesthetically pleasing, encourage them when they are down, help them develop self-control, and convince them that singing is the coolest possible way for them to spend the next however many minutes of their day. It is 180 minutes of pulling everything out of my bag of tricks, multi-tasking like nobody's business, and using every bit of any giftedness I happen to have. When I am done, I feel good, but I am ready to be quiet and deal with my own little life.....which, depending on the day my own children have had, is not maybe as quiet as I would like. It is a tricky balance.....I could definitely dive in more at my job, but I wouldn't have anything left when I got home.

When my kids are grown, I can see working with children (especially children who are at-risk in some way) turning from a job to a vocation......we'll see what happens.

[GrayMatterWife]

Can I get that on a magnet?

EXACTLY WHAT I WAS THINKING!!! Crude but so...exact.

[Auspicious]

Great thread, Abigail!

Publishing definitely falls into the career category for me. Definitely has meant more to me than a job, no one goes into it just for the money since there isn't any, has had a long-term trajectory, has played a very important role in my life. Not a vocation, though, because I wouldn't say I would never do anything else or that it's an essential part of who I am to the point where I have to continue in it. I could see leaving it in the future.

As for the parenting stuff and being home with my kid(s)--I guess this isn't the norm, but I can't quite think of them as even being on this spectrum. I think it's more because of my attitudes toward work than my attitudes toward parenting. Like in the work/life balance I need them to be on the "life" side of things. Nothing wrong with viewing it the other way, but I can never quite . . . emotionally connect with having them as my work or trying to apply my professional feelings to them instead of my personal feelings. That's probably a whole other thread, though.


For my husband, I feel like this is heretical to say, but I think that really science is his vocation, and medicine is the career that helps him live that in the most realistic and rewarding way. He was in research before med school and liked it, but looking down the road at becoming a PI or whatever, there were just career realities there he wasn't looking forward to. With medicine, I think he still feels connected to the science of it but the day-to-day of an attending appeals to him more than the day-to-day of a PI.

Which isn't to say he's not a nutcase--it came up again this past weekend that he sees no reason to ever retire, he's mentioned in the past how when you're in medicine, no matter what else you're doing at the moment there's always this part of your brain that's thinking through medical stuff 24/7, he sits bolt upright in the middle of the night suddenly thinking that he's done something that will negatively affect patient care, etc. In those ways he's pretty tied into the vocation of it, but I could see him having a science job that wasn't medical before a medical job that wasn't science-y. Luckily that's all very hypothetical and he feels on the right track right now.