recasting oneself

A few years after the ending of my last professional posting as a librarian, I finally acknowledged that I wasn't a librarian any more, and changed the job title on my tax return to "writer/editor" which was my new career starting up just about the time that my library career was winding down.

I've found that somebody else in a slightly parallel situation did the same thing.

At the time that W. invaded Iraq, a US diplomat in Greece made a 40-minute wonder on the news by resigning in protest. This interested me in particular because he'd been a high-school classmate of mine: not that we were personal friends, but I had known that he'd gone into the foreign service and I'd casually wondered what he thought of the events.

Later he published a book about it, which I read. He still considered himself a diplomat, and encouraged young people to go into the foreign service, but he also wondered what was to become of him now.

I just happened to look him up again. He's still living in Greece, which he loves, but his bio page says he's "returned to scholarship" as an ancient historian/archaeologist - which is what he studied in grad school before joining the State Department - "after a twenty-year detour working as a diplomat." That's the word he uses, detour. Despite what he thought at the time, it's not what he really was, it was something that distracted him for a while.

That's awfully parallel, and in fact I spent the same 20 year period as a librarian that he spent as a diplomat. But I dunno if his conclusion applies to me. There's a part of me that will always be a librarian, that decided when I was about 13 that that was the career I wanted. But an alternative double career as an editor of Tolkien scholarship and a reviewer of classical music concerts wasn't really an option, though if it had been I might have taken it. It's what I'm doing now, though: not to earn a living, since I'm retired and the income is nominal, but it does occupy my time in much more agreeable circumstances than a lot of my library work did. So that's what I am.