Meeting The Me That Could Have Been

by Laura Chanoux

For my current job, I signed up for a two-day project management course in downtown Chicago. On the first morning I left myself some time to get lost on my way there and consequently arrived a half-hour before class started. I grabbed coffee and sat down at one of the empty tables.

A few minutes later, a woman who looked my age sat down next to me and we started chatting.

“I do [cool job],” she said.

I bit my tongue to keep from saying, “Oh hey, that’s my dream job.” (Someone once asked me about my qualifications for my job after letting me know that her husband had also applied for the position. It was as uncomfortable as it sounds.)

“Oh nice! That always sounded like an interesting place to work,” I said, after sipping my coffee for too long to be normal.

As we talked further, it became clear that she was living the life I’d planned in college. She was the me that could have been.

Let’s examine the facts:

1. Alternative Me and I both attended large Midwestern universities and majored in history.
2. I wanted to pursue a graduate degree in history before I understood things like student debt and tenure-track placement rates. Alternative Me recently earned a graduate degree in history.
3. She went to graduate school in the city where I grew up.
4. Alternative Me moved to Chicago and works at a company where I had interviewed a couple of times, but wasn’t offered a position.
5. OUR NAMES RHYMED. WHAT.

There were other tenuous connections: we live in the same neighborhood! We both have siblings! We were born within five years of each other! I spent the morning mentally pouring over the ways her life could have been my life.

It’s easy to second-guess decisions. What if I’d gone to another school? What if I moved to a different city? What if I took that other job? But I hadn’t before been in a situation where I so clearly saw the results of the choices I didn’t make.

My life plans at age nineteen were basically “be a rom-com heroine.” I wanted to work in publishing, live in a major city, and learn how to wear cute skirts in the winter. Over the next couple of years, these goals became more concrete: work at an academic press, live in Boston or Chicago, and somehow use my degree in history.

Between graduation and turning twenty-six, I got an unpaid internship in academic publishing, took a temp job when the internship ended, traveled for eight months, moved to Chicago, temped again for several months, and started working in higher education administration. Last year’s polar vortex killed my skirt-in-winter dreams for good and I’m using my history degree more for research skills than for critical analysis of 1970s social trends.

As I talked to the woman in my training class, who was friendly, smart, and engaging, it became clear that she didn’t follow an entirely linear career path. She had a second professional degree in a subject she decided not to pursue, and her current position hadn’t been a long-held goal. At this point, it really wasn’t mine, either.

When trying to plan out my career, I tend to get nostalgic for my college course requirements. They took the overwhelming options of the course catalog and pared them down to a manageable path to follow towards an ultimate goal. I’ve had to shake the idea that life and jobs work the same way after graduation. There’s no “knock out these distribution requirements next to earn success in your field” list with a badge at the end, and end goals are more flexible and varied than I thought when I was nineteen.

Laura Chanoux works in higher education in Chicago.

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