TerrieMiller.com

“Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.” -Ray Bradbury (born 08/22/1920), US writer

On Friday, I handed in my resignation at work. No, I’m not leaving to take another job…I’m planning to take an extended period of time off; to go deep with some writing and other creative projects, spend lots of time outside, develop some new habits that promote a healthier lifestyle for Steve and myself, and try to figure out a path to my life work. It’s a big leap, and decades of work has lead to my decision to not work for a while.

I started working for money when I was in my early teens with the usual things…baby sitting and house cleaning. I’d already worked for barter (working in the school cafeteria through lunch and recess in exchange for free lunch) and for family.

In junior high school, I became interested in astronomy. I liked the projects we did in science class. And I liked that it was something I could talk about at the dinner table that would catch Dad’s interest. The more I talked about science, the more people seemed to notice. Before long, I was vowing (at thirteen!) that I was going to be an astronomer when I grew up. Some teachers encouraged me to keep my options open or even pointed out that my talents seemed to be showing up in English courses instead, but other adults seemed impressed by my professed interest. I got a lot of approval for planning to go into science and in choosing it as a career path. The only problem was, once I’d spoken it out loud, I didn’t feel I could turn back. This career in astronomy took on a life of its own. People were just starting to make noise about women in science and engineering then…they loved it when they found a girl who could win science fairs, and I loved the approval and attention I got for it. Between my junior and senior year in high school, I got my first planetarium job and moved an hour away from home to work at it. The real value in that summer, and the ones that followed it in Toledo, was in the cultural experience of living in a city and around professors, grad students, and their families. It expanded my horizons beyond the isolated farmland I’d grown up in. But it also solidified the path.

I went to college and fell flat on my face (sometimes literally, but we won’t go into that here). Math and physics, the core of astronomy, were huge painful struggles for me. I ignored that I loathed those classes. And I had to work my way through school, never less than twenty hours a week and in the last two years much more. At the beginning of my fifth year, I gave up on the electromagnetics class I needed to finish my degree. I went to my adviser, ready to accept that I’d need to stay in school still longer and change majors. I was shocked to learn that he could sign a paper and simply substitute a history of astronomy course for the electromagnetics for me to get the degree, and I did.

I tried to make the best of it by using my degree to get an internship at Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Like the summers in Toledo, the value of that summer and fall was in making my own way independently in a big city. The internship barely paid a subsistence stipend, even though I found a boarding house that was a nonprofit designed to give young professional women a safe inexpensive place to live in the city. I depended on another skill I’d learned in college, bar tending, to supplement the stipend. I was working full time at one job, and part time at another.

I gave up on astronomy in New York. And I gave up on the internship. Exhausted, I went back to Columbus and became an almost full-time bar manager. I had a great time. During the mornings, I did secretarial work back in the astronomy department, improving my MS Word skills day by day. Eventually I got annoyed with the regulars who would be waiting at the door of the bar when I opened in the afternoon, treating it as if it were their living room. I realized that owning a bar wouldn’t be right for me either. So when my boyfriend got accepted to Indiana University, I leapt at the chance to work for WordStar International, doing tech support at a new center they were opening in Bloomington. Before tech companies outsourced work to India, they tried doing it to us…cheap labor from the Midwest to replace the higher-paid employees in California.

That’s how I landed in tech, and into a series of jobs ending with the one I’m leaving now. I’ve never had more than two weeks at a time free of a job. I’ve always moved from one to another as quickly as possible, leaving when it became too unbearable. It is a huge testament to my employer and coworkers that I’ve been at O’Reilly now for almost nine years. (More on that in another post). I’ve found good and satisfying work here, but the more I open to who I am, the less a job in building web sites fits me.

My career has developed by trying to make the best of poor decisions and a poor career path, brought on by my own stubbornness and refusal to admit that it wasn’t fitting. And it started because I was impressionable and susceptible to the approval I got for being a girl interested in science. I’ll probably get hate mail for saying it, but I wonder how many others there are of us out there who suffered through college and feel that we wasted an opportunity to really discover our true passions. I cringe when I hear people rally to the cause of getting more women into science and engineering careers. It’s hard for me to understand how promoting a specific career path to women is much different than discouraging them from one. I believe that girls are more sensitive to approval, and that they may seek this approval in ways that cause them to deny their true callings, even to themselves. I believe this because it was my own experience.

I’m 44 years old. I’ve got a husband who supports me following my heart. I haven’t had this chance before, but somehow I ended up in Sonoma County, California, in an environment where I feel empowered to take risk and be open to wonderful possibilities, and among people who are inspirational in how they’ve found important work that energizes and fulfills them. And that’s what I want myself.

It will be fun to figure out what it is.