What was your job that changed your life? The question sounds arrogantly confident, as if it were asked from a vantage point, because, let’s be real, many of us work in jobs that our circumstances force us to find ourselves in. Fatum being what it is, the best thing we can do is adjust ourselves to it. So I feel left out of good fortune, not meeting my tides in their course and almost lamenting when I hear people talk about their memorable jobs that make them visit their beloved workplaces again. Indeed, they loved rising from bed and going to work with delight.
Money is not the driving force that carves memories into lovely shapes, because there are lucrative jobs that make people feel so unhappy that they wish there were more holidays than workdays every month. Cassidy, in this elegantly witty essay, shares how her love of reading and a dose of chance (or, more precisely, luck) concocted for her a job as a bookseller, bringing her into contact with authors. I think that, for Cassidy, a cushy job with a six-figure income and a month of paid vacation would not have satisfied her literary streak, free spirit, and adventurous mind, which lured her to sail away rather than anchor in a safe harbor. She described how bookselling consummated her love of books, which had begun in childhood. It was like a dream come true. Bene! Being a bookseller, as she had wished since childhood, would make her happy, as she did not have to make ends meet, while a single mother who has always been a literary woman has no choice but to work at a nine-to-five job.
Through her hands-on experience as a bookseller, Cassidy also invited us to peep at some of the authors she encountered backstage. And, to be brutally honest, many of the authors seemed anything but what she had innocently anticipated writers to be: lamps of society enlightening the minds of readers, whatever genre they belonged to. She illustrated this through her encounter with her hero, Helen Garner, a renowned feminist writer. Alas, the moment yielded an epistemological axiom: don’t worship authors, but admire their books. And that was not the end of the candid-camera moments. Many in the writing profession must be intellectually spoiled, if not grumpy. We have learned this while shedding tears over being brokenhearted.
Those of you who can say without hesitation that you once had a job you liked so much that getting up early made every day a happy day to go to work must have been protected by the gods of Troy. But that should not dishearten you if you have not had such a job. In fact, not many people are fortunate enough to say they have had one, and that should not make us feel small. After all, this newspaper asks famous people, not ordinary people, to write about their beloved jobs, because the reality of most jobs is not so memorable.
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