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For as long as I can remember, I have identified myself in two ways - one is by the things I do, and the other is with adjectives. I am a ____ person. In a lot of ways, I decide how I'll do the self-identification by activity based on which adjectives I'm leaning the most on currently. I'll do activity x because I am a y person. I'm not saying this is necessarily a healthy process, or one I do actively (I certainly never sit down and think "I can't do activity y! I'm too much a z person for that!"); it's just something that I have become aware of.
For ages and ages, the most important of those adjectives has been "creative". I am a creative person. I cling to this definition. It's important to me. I've drifted a lot in my "professional life". I often tell people that I'm still deciding what to be when I grow up, and it's true. I just don't know what I want to do. And part of that is because "creative" is so important to me, and yet, really and truly, I have a hard time creating anything professionally. When I quit my job at Barnes & Noble and moved more solidly into the technology field with Todd this year, it was a big decision, and it was based on a lot of factors. Money factored into it, of course, but not so much at that point. I wanted a job out of retail, despite the fact that I'm very, very good at retail. I felt stifled by the corporate atmosphere, and I was tired and sick all the time. The schduling was hell on me. And also, I wanted a job that was "smarter". See, we're back to the adjective thing. My discontentment with being a bookseller (and I really thought that way - I was a bookseller, it wasn't just what I did) stemmed at least in part from the fact that I felt like my intellectual and creative talents were wasted in the retail environment. The most creative thing I ever got to do was design very small displays of books on the ends of the aisles. I felt like my intellect (and here comes a little bit of Cis-hubris) could surely be put to better use than impressing customers and co-workers and making money for The Man (tm).
This kind of thing has cropped up again and again with jobs I've had - I had a job reading and scoring essays for standardized tests, and I was very, very good at it. The pay sucked, though, and although I loved my coworkers (yay smart people) I disliked the atmosphere, I pushed myself to excel so much so that I developed a twitch in my eye from rapidly reading and analyzing so many handwritten papers, and I was unhappy. I began to feel that the work could be done by a sufficiently sophisticated algorithm, and I was just a body with a degree and a good analytical brain. I produced nothing, I created nothing. I worked on several projects, but when Todd got the job with the bank in Charlotte, I quit the company and haven't gone back.
Where am I going with this? Have patience with me. I'm still working all of this out myself.
So. Here I am, bound and tied to this "creative" word, and trying to find work to go with it. And "smart" too. But you see, here's a new wrinkle to this weird rumpled bedsheet that is my life. I've had opportunities to be creative professionally with this job. Lots, actually. And I didn't like it. I get frustrated when asked to be creative on demand, and grumpy too. I want specifics, dammit, and for "creative" work you just don't get any usually. At least, not here. Even more shocking, the tasks which even I have labelled "menial" and "repetitive" are the ones I like the most. When 97 teachers need the same three SQL queries run for each of them, and the results for each documented, and a pattern found in the results? That's a lot of bitch work. It's pretty menial. You could, actually, write a really simple program to do it (maybe even the pattern finding bit). And I love it. When a tiny change has to be done to sixteen different modperl templates to fix a display issue, but it's just complex and varied enough that grep and replace can't handle it? I'm there baby. When we need to take images in one format from one database, crop each of them into three different images, save them in a different format, and load them into another database? Goodness, how tedious! Sign me up. And I'm struggling with this, because it doesn't mesh with how I've always viewed myself, the words I've used to mean "me". A large part of me rebels from all this - yes, I like doing these things, but I should cut it out! It's not right! That's lame! Why should I like things that aren't creative? Why should I like detail work rather than, um, not? It just doesn't work. I feel like by enjoying these parts of my job, I'm somehow demeaning myself.
I'm not, though, and I need to stop fighting and struggling with this in such a silly way. The fact of the matter is that I don't enjoy or excel at creativity in the workplace. And when I'm being more creative at work, I'm less creative on my downtime, and that makes me sad and unhappy too. Just as I don't want to be defined as a "menial" person, I also don't want to squander my creativity writing copy to glorify a company on a webpage, or whatever.
Todd has, for a number of years, tried to get me into programming. He thinks I'd be good at it. He argues that it's "creative" work, it's "smart" work, it's geeky work, and it's something that I've expressed interest in (and I have - I've tried several times to learn several different languages). But, and this is the big but, I've never wanted to *do* programming. I know this sounds silly, but it's a big mental block for me. And I've run into problems again and again trying to program; I get emotional - very emotional - when I try something and it doesn't work, or I can't see the solution to a problem. I'll cry. And I can't imagine having to deal with that kind of frustration on a daily basis. I know that if I practice, I'll do better, be better. But the process of creating programs I just don't enjoy at all.
I think there's a fundamental difference between the creative programmer and the creative writer, too. A program is designed to do something. There is a definite working state to it. A short story, or poem, or novel doesn't do anything like that. It just exists, and maybe it gets across the story you were trying to tell, or evokes emotions, or makes the point you were trying to make clear, but... it's not the same. In fact, it's really really really different. I can write well. And I love to write. I don't like writing professionally, and I do love doing creative writing on my own, for my own purposes. Maybe someday I'll publish some of my works, and maybe not, but I don't want to do business writing, and I don't want to do programming. I have settled on this, finally.
However, a new door is looming in front of me now. It's shiny, and alluring, and a neat golden kind of glow is coming out from under it. It calls to me. It represents a synthesis of many interests, many adjectives. It says "you can be detail-oriented and you can be nit-picky and you can be smart, and you can still learn new technologies and you can put it all to work." It's the same door as the programmer door, with a slightly different frame and a slightly different point of entry. Rather than writing code, I can maintain it. I can learn enough of, say, VB, to be able to read the code for our handheld application, and figure out why certain things work (or don't work). I can go through and clean up the comments, and add more of my own, to make it make sense. I can enhance rather than create. I can re-use, and I can recycle, and I can make things work without getting frustrated and crying, because you know, this isn't my code.
I've already tried this a little this week - this maintenance programer stuff is, well, it's pretty easy for me so far. I have the right problem solving kind of attitude, and the right analytical kind of brain, to make reading convoluted code and bad comments possible. I have the right resources (including a husband who is a programmer) to be able to decipher and unearth and then fix things. I fixed something on the handheld, and I did it without any help, and I did it in just two nights. I'm hopeful about this, and I think maybe this is what I've been needing for a long time. A way to leave creativity for my creative endeavors, except for a creative approach to problems, without feeling like my brain is atrophying. I can do something useful and still feel like I'm not just another minion toiling in the minion mines. The door is looking more and more attractive... I think I just might walk through it.
For ages and ages, the most important of those adjectives has been "creative". I am a creative person. I cling to this definition. It's important to me. I've drifted a lot in my "professional life". I often tell people that I'm still deciding what to be when I grow up, and it's true. I just don't know what I want to do. And part of that is because "creative" is so important to me, and yet, really and truly, I have a hard time creating anything professionally. When I quit my job at Barnes & Noble and moved more solidly into the technology field with Todd this year, it was a big decision, and it was based on a lot of factors. Money factored into it, of course, but not so much at that point. I wanted a job out of retail, despite the fact that I'm very, very good at retail. I felt stifled by the corporate atmosphere, and I was tired and sick all the time. The schduling was hell on me. And also, I wanted a job that was "smarter". See, we're back to the adjective thing. My discontentment with being a bookseller (and I really thought that way - I was a bookseller, it wasn't just what I did) stemmed at least in part from the fact that I felt like my intellectual and creative talents were wasted in the retail environment. The most creative thing I ever got to do was design very small displays of books on the ends of the aisles. I felt like my intellect (and here comes a little bit of Cis-hubris) could surely be put to better use than impressing customers and co-workers and making money for The Man (tm).
This kind of thing has cropped up again and again with jobs I've had - I had a job reading and scoring essays for standardized tests, and I was very, very good at it. The pay sucked, though, and although I loved my coworkers (yay smart people) I disliked the atmosphere, I pushed myself to excel so much so that I developed a twitch in my eye from rapidly reading and analyzing so many handwritten papers, and I was unhappy. I began to feel that the work could be done by a sufficiently sophisticated algorithm, and I was just a body with a degree and a good analytical brain. I produced nothing, I created nothing. I worked on several projects, but when Todd got the job with the bank in Charlotte, I quit the company and haven't gone back.
Where am I going with this? Have patience with me. I'm still working all of this out myself.
So. Here I am, bound and tied to this "creative" word, and trying to find work to go with it. And "smart" too. But you see, here's a new wrinkle to this weird rumpled bedsheet that is my life. I've had opportunities to be creative professionally with this job. Lots, actually. And I didn't like it. I get frustrated when asked to be creative on demand, and grumpy too. I want specifics, dammit, and for "creative" work you just don't get any usually. At least, not here. Even more shocking, the tasks which even I have labelled "menial" and "repetitive" are the ones I like the most. When 97 teachers need the same three SQL queries run for each of them, and the results for each documented, and a pattern found in the results? That's a lot of bitch work. It's pretty menial. You could, actually, write a really simple program to do it (maybe even the pattern finding bit). And I love it. When a tiny change has to be done to sixteen different modperl templates to fix a display issue, but it's just complex and varied enough that grep and replace can't handle it? I'm there baby. When we need to take images in one format from one database, crop each of them into three different images, save them in a different format, and load them into another database? Goodness, how tedious! Sign me up. And I'm struggling with this, because it doesn't mesh with how I've always viewed myself, the words I've used to mean "me". A large part of me rebels from all this - yes, I like doing these things, but I should cut it out! It's not right! That's lame! Why should I like things that aren't creative? Why should I like detail work rather than, um, not? It just doesn't work. I feel like by enjoying these parts of my job, I'm somehow demeaning myself.
I'm not, though, and I need to stop fighting and struggling with this in such a silly way. The fact of the matter is that I don't enjoy or excel at creativity in the workplace. And when I'm being more creative at work, I'm less creative on my downtime, and that makes me sad and unhappy too. Just as I don't want to be defined as a "menial" person, I also don't want to squander my creativity writing copy to glorify a company on a webpage, or whatever.
Todd has, for a number of years, tried to get me into programming. He thinks I'd be good at it. He argues that it's "creative" work, it's "smart" work, it's geeky work, and it's something that I've expressed interest in (and I have - I've tried several times to learn several different languages). But, and this is the big but, I've never wanted to *do* programming. I know this sounds silly, but it's a big mental block for me. And I've run into problems again and again trying to program; I get emotional - very emotional - when I try something and it doesn't work, or I can't see the solution to a problem. I'll cry. And I can't imagine having to deal with that kind of frustration on a daily basis. I know that if I practice, I'll do better, be better. But the process of creating programs I just don't enjoy at all.
I think there's a fundamental difference between the creative programmer and the creative writer, too. A program is designed to do something. There is a definite working state to it. A short story, or poem, or novel doesn't do anything like that. It just exists, and maybe it gets across the story you were trying to tell, or evokes emotions, or makes the point you were trying to make clear, but... it's not the same. In fact, it's really really really different. I can write well. And I love to write. I don't like writing professionally, and I do love doing creative writing on my own, for my own purposes. Maybe someday I'll publish some of my works, and maybe not, but I don't want to do business writing, and I don't want to do programming. I have settled on this, finally.
However, a new door is looming in front of me now. It's shiny, and alluring, and a neat golden kind of glow is coming out from under it. It calls to me. It represents a synthesis of many interests, many adjectives. It says "you can be detail-oriented and you can be nit-picky and you can be smart, and you can still learn new technologies and you can put it all to work." It's the same door as the programmer door, with a slightly different frame and a slightly different point of entry. Rather than writing code, I can maintain it. I can learn enough of, say, VB, to be able to read the code for our handheld application, and figure out why certain things work (or don't work). I can go through and clean up the comments, and add more of my own, to make it make sense. I can enhance rather than create. I can re-use, and I can recycle, and I can make things work without getting frustrated and crying, because you know, this isn't my code.
I've already tried this a little this week - this maintenance programer stuff is, well, it's pretty easy for me so far. I have the right problem solving kind of attitude, and the right analytical kind of brain, to make reading convoluted code and bad comments possible. I have the right resources (including a husband who is a programmer) to be able to decipher and unearth and then fix things. I fixed something on the handheld, and I did it without any help, and I did it in just two nights. I'm hopeful about this, and I think maybe this is what I've been needing for a long time. A way to leave creativity for my creative endeavors, except for a creative approach to problems, without feeling like my brain is atrophying. I can do something useful and still feel like I'm not just another minion toiling in the minion mines. The door is looking more and more attractive... I think I just might walk through it.
