Career by committee redux

I think I've got it.

Vacations are dangerous for me; they tend to interfere with my comfortable state of denial. It took going to Italy to light the fire that let me say and do all the aversive things I had to in order to get out of India; it took a week of nature meditation to get serious about the next steps.

Upon returning from the bike trip, I organized the option set thusly: (1) a better job; (2) grad school; (3) freelancing. I then used all my powers of imagination to build specific multiple virtual lives, and considerable skills in criticism and worst-casing to knock them down. One still stands (sort of). We'll get to that.

Jobs-wise, I visited all the usual sites daily. Not necessarily to get a job (though I was in a couple of cases tempted), but to try to figure out what kind of job I might want to get. I kept a notebook of specific titles that looked interesting, hoping to find a pattern. I emailed with various people (thanks, various people!) about specific organizations and locations. I'd stop what I was doing at random points during my workday (easy enough...) to imagine what I might be doing at those same points in other possible job-worlds, and what might be wrong or tedious about those alternate universes.

In the end, there were a lot of almost-good-enough options. My interests are all over the map, making it hard to do targeted prep, and, frankly, any career that offers essentially unchanging duties over the next 20 years, without, say, the option of moving to Armenia in the near term, fills me with dread (even if I don't actually want to move to Armenia at the moment, which further complicates things).

I moved on to the academic option. Academia has two large pluses going for it: (1) when we were biking through Shepherdstown, it occurred to me that it would be an agreeable life to have a low-key academic job in an artsy and charming little town like that, and (2) when I tot up all the job factors that are important to me (independence of schedule and agenda; creativity; not having to wear a suit; non-managerial role; variety; travel opportunities; non-evilness), academia does very well. One huge honking negative: I tried it before, and it was a spectacular disaster. So, ok; that makes me reluctant to return to psychology. Instead, I thoroughly checked out epidemiology, medical anthropology, linguistics, etc., poring over journals and textbooks. Results: meh. Nothing was a perfect fit, and probably an uphill battle to get into any decent program. And jobs are scarce.

Which left freelancing. I joined mediabistro.com; I read through every single transcript of every class they offered; I read fora; I worked out a detailed plan for where I could cheaply live, how productive I would need to be, how and where I could get benefits, etc. And, yes: I do want to freelance.

But not exclusively. It'd be thrilling for the first year or two, to test my mettle, see if I could truly live by the pen, and so forth. But I couldn't envision a scenario -- or crunch the numbers in a way -- that didn't eventually end with taking at least a part-time fairly dead-end editorial job in addition.

So I decided to keep my current job.

Kidding.

My subconscious, still feeling guilty about being so (deceptively!) unproductive during vacation, heaved a big sigh, stood up, cleared its throat, and said, in a small, clear voice:

PhD. Communications.

And it's great! The field covers some of my top interests in psychology, linguistics, culture, media, politics, and even ethology. I already have a MA in a closely-allied area. And I enjoyed getting that degree, and would even have no problem asking my profs for references (they may not remember me, but the fact that they don't hate me and wouldn't have me on a blacklist speaks volumes, I'm telling you). Not only could I freelance, but it would even be career-relevant rather than a sideline. And I can build a relatively coherent application, giving me a shot at some good schools, and, hence, at jobs.

There are, of course, downsides. First, this is clearly a "three years of abject poverty followed by a lifetime of penury" track. But I've made my peace with that. Second, and still unresolved, there will of course be people -- possibly including myself -- who will sneer "sure, she's got a PhD. But it's in communications." That's an issue but not a deal-breaker.

There must be others. Please: knock it down. I need auxiliary negativity here, lest I make an expensive mistake.