Reclaiming the Work Week

I just got my first paying “non-dentist” gig! I have been retained by a non-profit group here in Charlotte to update their website. A friend of mine put me in touch with the group, and after a few informal meetings I was given essentially a shoe-box full of news clippings and internal memos from which I am to generate a narrative of what the group has been doing these last few years.

It has been such a change of pace from my clinical job. First of all it’s nice to walk into a room and have people be genuinely glad to see me. In dentistry, even the nicest patients are a bit tense when I’m present because they know at some point I’m going to pick up something sharp and stick it in their mouth! Happily I didn’t have to do that once with the non-profit group, and from their demeanor I think they appreciated that fact. Secondly, it was refreshing to get to use a different part of my brain. Dentistry is a lot of analysis, very mechanical, and confined to a decidedly small space. Going through the information given to me by the non-profit group involved more synthesis—taking the information, sorting through it, and putting the essentials into narrative form. And what a luxury to be able to spread out over my entire coffee table! I’m not sure if it’s the novelty, or if I could really do this for a living—but for now I’m having a good time.

The one thing I’ve noticed is that it’s been very difficult to fit a career back into my life. I’ve been unemployed now for two months, and somehow have managed to fill up my days without the encumbrance of a job. I heard somewhere that goldfish grow to fit whatever size environment they are placed in. If they are kept in a small tank, they stay small. If they are put into a pond, however, they can grow to be quite large. I believe that is how I have approached my life. When I was working 40 hours a week, I kept side projects to a minimum. Now that I have all this additional time—I have been able to tackle several tasks. I’ve redone the closets in my bedroom, drawn up a 5-page Emergency Plan for a performance theater of which I am a board member, and updated all the software on my lap-top. And those iTunes songs didn’t download themselves! It’s been a busy time, and trying to fit a job back into the mix is going to be very difficult. For the benefit of a paycheck, however, I think I’ll make the effort. I just have to figure out how to shrink a goldfish.