Me at Chichen Itza, Mexico
I have always been a planner. I make pro/con lists and I write out goals and I have a current bucketlist that I update a few times a year. I don’t always reach the goals I set, but it helps me to make a plan and come up with the steps I need to accomplish to reach a goal. When I was in high school, I had the goal to have the lead role in the school musical my senior year. I started performing in the school musicals when I was in grade school. I was in Camelot when I was in sixth grade, as a fairy to Morgan Le Fey. I was in the choir of General Stanley’s Daughters in Pirates of Penzance when I was in eighth grade. That musical is considered an opera and I was on stage almost all the time singing. It was amazing.
One big obstacle to my senior year goal was that I had a classmate who was also a singer and an actor and she and I competed for everything! If there was a role that needed filling in the band, choir or theater department we were almost always head to head for it. So I knew even setting my senior year musical goal when I was a freshman in high school that I was putting myself at risk. It was a big goal!
And as high school rolled on, I knew that it was going to be difficult on the teaching staff and other adults involved in my senior year high school musical to make a choice between my classmate and I. But what I didn’t count on was that they knew we both wanted this. They knew we both worked hard for it and, because of that, they picked a musical play with two female leads.
The musical was Carousel. I played Carrie Pipperidge and my friend played Julie Jordan.
I think the moral of this goal for me has always been that even when things you really want seem out of reach, you have no idea what universal forces will be at work around you. If you really want something and you focus on it with all your positive energy and you work at each step of that goal with everything inside you, you CAN get there. I have managed to do it over and over again, and sometimes, in the middle of working toward a goal I realize that I really don’t want that, but instead I want this. I can go back in my pro/con lists and my goal lists year by eyar and see what I’ve accomplished, what I’ve changed and what didn’t work out (that list is rather small) and see why it didn’t work.
When I was in college, I wanted to get my PhD in archaeology and teach at a university. I’d wanted that since I was about 11-years-old, however, by the time I got to college, I had three children in tow and I was married. I did get my Bachelor’s in Anthropology, but I wasn’t able to go to field school and as a result, didn’t get a degree in archaeology. I thought at the time that I would eventually get the kids farther along in school and I would go back to graduate school and study archaeology. However, that didn’t work out either and even though I did get a Master’s degree and I am teaching at the college level, I did not attain that goal.
What I did get though was a lot of other accomplishments. I was able to write a paper on a tribe in the Philippines for an honors undergraduate thesis project that was used in a professional journal. I took a job straight out of my undergrad work that afforded me a lot of “comp” time, because I traveled and gave presentations on weekend every few months. This weekend work gave me a lot of extra time off that I used to travel with my kids and go on adventures. I saved a lot of money on students loans I would have taken out to get my PhD. And all these years later, I have a job teaching college history, which is something I’ve always loved. I had enough history credits in my transcripts, that those credits combined with my Master’s Degree, I was able to qualify to teach history.
So even though I’m not out there as the female Indiana Jones I wanted to be when I was 11-years-old, I am teaching college and spending my free time traveling all over the world, visiting the sites I wanted to be digging. It is not quite how I thought that goal would turn out, but it’s not less than what I wanted, it’s just different.