Paralyzed: The Life of the Mid-Level Career Woman (Part III)

I read in Laura D’Andrea Tyson’s column in Business Week that women at the top of corporations are making just as much money as their male counterparts. That’s great news! The not-so-great news is that the River Styx separates Carly Fiorina from us bright, professional girls, who lack the proper floatation devices we’ll need to get across the cruddy waters of career advancement.

It’s a long journey, and a lot of us “career women” are not only getting tired, we’re resenting Ann Taylor and the drop-everything attitudes we need to get there.

I don’t have a piece of gold jewelry, a tweed two-piece, or a sensible haircut. Frankly it’s not my style. And I like my weekends! And I like wearing Campers to work! I’m not sure how I turned out like this, a dissenter. It just happened eventually; I started going to work to work, to earn a paycheck, not to tread the path to Carlydom.

“Relax, it’s just garden-variety burnout,” said one of my oldest, bestest, friends, Katy. We’re alike in so many ways. We’re both ambitious to a fault, the kind of people who don’t recognize we’re sick or tired when we’re in our career zone.

Katy lives in Iowa, works in nonprofit, and has four kids. Aside from these cosmetic differences we’re like two peas in a pod. I say we’re alike because she feels my vocational pain. When we catch up on the weekends we talk about our jobs like they were our wayward lovers—attentive at times but always doomed to fail us. We stick by them because we don’t know any other way. Without her job, Katy would just be a mother. I would just be…I’ll think of something.

“We’re at that stage of our careers when people don’t know what to do with us,” Katy says. We’re not established enough to have headhunters come running after us (OK, I’m not), but we’re not low-level enough to eat shit sandwiches, either. Unfortunately we are at a razor-thin level, respected in a pinch, but then asked to order cable for the boss when he’s really tied down.

It’s a formative time in our professional upbringings; if we don’t get the proper mentoring and nurturance we will fail to graduate to the executive level; we’ll settle into pissy 9 to 5 middle managers, or we’ll say ‘Screw This’ and start our own organic food line.

I work with relatively nurturing people—they like me and offer the requisite promises to keep developing me over the long haul. Time was when that was enough. But every day that I sit in that ergonomically correct chair I get closer to a feeling of utter despair, like I’m wasting myself.

I know, it’s a bit precious. I don’t deny it. Fortunately I have other precious-minded friends, like my girlfriend Elisabeth, who once worked in marketing, started acting for a while, and is now contemplating entering a ministry. People like Elisabeth come off as downright flaky to those who have, say, worked at GE for 15 years. But I can vouch for her: some people really do need to travel a path, putting themselves in financial or emotional stress, until they figure it out.

“Sometimes it gets too painful avoiding the truth,” Elisabeth told me of her decision to leave the corporate world. “And you just have to follow that feeling. That’s your path.”

I realize I’m on a path, the path I said I wanted to be on. But it looks very, very different than I thought it would when I graduated from college. It’s been trodden on by many others; there are tracks for me to follow if I don’t have the gumption to off-road. But it bores me.

My friend Craig tells me that I’m having my mid-life crisis 20 years early, but I’m not so sure. I sat in a fascinating meeting today with a group of Executive Development and Human Resource heads (I was sitting in with my boss, total fly-on-the-wall situation). The discussion was centered around what senior people need to stay at companies. One exec suggested that it’s getting harder keeping top talent because this group is getting tired of giving up their lives for their jobs. It seems the higher you get, the more your job can threaten to take over.

The current group of execs are mostly comprised of the tail end of the Baby Boomers; we Gen Xers are next. If I'm representative of my generation, we’re watching the front line go into boardroom battle first and having none of it. Don’t get me wrong, we want success, but success for us is highly personalized. We don’t believe in martyrdom, and we want to make money our way, on our time, and are willing to forego a title and window office in exchange for some variety, some satisfaction. Some feeling in the gut that says we're getting used properly.

Comments

[Joy DJ]

It just gets better and better...really loved this part. Wonderful! -Joy

Whining doesn't become you. You lead a life that is the envy of your peers. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and you took the one less travelled by..... and it HAS made all the didderence.

[Jory]

Dad, is that you?

[WealthNet Partners]

I don't consider people who like to jump around to different fields of work flaky at all. I think it helps to keep life all the more interesting, especially if you find you dislike the work you've jumped into. Best to shake things up if you ask me.

Marc