Jobs for Introverts

A little story about a girl barking up the wrong tree.

I made three(!) trips to my son’s school today — a parents guild meeting after drop-off, carpool pick-up, and then back-to-school night. I forgot my phone for trip two, which sucked because I couldn’t listen to my podcast about cults. It was a lot. For much of the last 18 years, I’ve been home with my kids (or, more accurately, chauffeuring them to and from our home) while my husband has financially supported our family.

Now that one son is in college and the other in high school, I find myself becoming increasingly job-curious. Which, naturally, has me thinking about cave women. I have questions: How did this whole hunter-gatherer dichotomy come about anyway? Did cave women have ambitions beyond keeping a tidy cave and feeding the cave children three square meals? Did they ever have it “up to here” with the system and revolt?

When I was six years old, I had a favorite picture book that I studied like I was going to be tested on it. Its gospel was that girls could be anything they wanted to be when they grew up. Anything. Like a hairdresser or baker or teacher or policewoman (if you were that girl who insisted on wearing pants). It was 1976, and, as a descendant of cave people, I was perfectly content with, even excited by, the options. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a glamorous stewardess?

The women’s lib movement had other ideas. Its mantra for girls was that we should “aim higher” to “have it all,” as if traditionally female professions were beneath us. (Hey, if we learned anything from the pandemic, isn’t it that skilled hairdressers are an absolute necessity to civilized society?) By the time I was ten, the indoctrination was so deep that I truly believed my lot in life was to bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and if I wore a specific scent, I’d never let some dude forget he’s a man. Add to this to-do list the biological assignment to bear and rear children, and that’s quite a full plate. Honestly, even at ten, this all seemed to be a bit of an overcorrection.

But, I tried to fulfill my obligations of being a modern woman as best I could. Gloria Steinem was counting on me to break glass ceilings, and I had to start somewhere. In high school, I worked as many shifts as I could at Benetton, mostly because employees were allowed to wear the merchandise, then re-tag it so it could be sold (yes, eww). I did my fair share of babysitting and camp counselor-ing. I spent a few summers working the local festival circuit, peddling funnel cakes, fried vegetables, and homemade lemonade. I don’t even know where to begin explaining that experience, but I will say that no human or even pet animal should ever eat or drink anything from a booth at a summer festival. I was paid three dollars an hour cash, was attacked by bees, hitched rides to work from a guy whose car doors didn’t open and had to climb through the window Dukes of Hazard style, and came home every day covered in grease and powdered sugar and reeking of onions. A rung on the ladder to having it all, this job certainly was not.

For the next decade and a half I did all the things I thought I should do to live up to my potential. I graduated college, aced law school, even held a prestigious federal judicial clerkship. Surely I’d be the next Ally McBeal, trying hot cases and having an even hotter dating life. Or not.

Turns out, and I know this is blasphemy, I wasn’t the most ambitious gal.

The last time I actively pursued and landed a job was in the 90s, when I was a young attorney moving from Chicago to Los Angeles. Even then, the only criteria for my search was that the job had to be walking distance to Century City mall. I was probably the laziest corporate lawyer the firm had ever seen, followed by an uninspired stint as a business affairs executive, and a failed attempt at writing for TV. While all of my friends were working their way up, reaching for the brass ring, I preferred to just hang out on the merry-go-round. At the mall.

I thought something might be wrong with me. Was I depressed? Did I have ADHD? It was only when I had my babies and quit working that I felt truly passionate about and gratified by a “job.” But there’s no bacon in stay-at-home motherhood. Or enough respect for it. At times, I felt snubbed or judged by the working moms. “I thought for sure you would have had the time to make a Halloween costume from scratch!” If not actually said out loud, I knew that’s what they were thinking when they saw my kid in his creased, straight-from-the-package Pikachu getup. Or maybe it was my own guilt talking, for falling short of the expectations for my generation of women. Now, 18 years later, my kids are pretty well baked (see, even at six-years-old I was destined to be a baker), and I’m asking myself — with some trepidation — whether there’s something else I could do with my time that’s somewhat fulfilling. Where to start?

I entered a few keywords on Google. “Jobs for writers” yielded an overwhelming number of links that may as well have been written in Python. What is an SEO blogger? Direct response copywriter? Content mill? Two cents a word? Is that even legal? It’s like I was in a cryo chamber for the last two decades and someone just thawed me out. What I thought the interwebs would reveal is how to get an article published in a luddite magazine. What I got instead was a deluge of job posting sites with descriptions of gigs that either I didn’t understand or sounded downright sketchy.

I tried another search: “Jobs for introverts.”

As a kid, I don’t think I’d ever heard the word introvert, and if I had I probably thought it was a pathological condition. After all, it’s always the quiet ones who go postal. When I was in my late 40s, I took a Myers-Briggs personality test as part of a school Board retreat. When the results came back, we trustees sat four to a table in a conference room, eagerly devouring our respective reports. Which one of us was an EFSP? An ITIJ? An ETSJ? While I quietly read every word of mine, my tablemates were animatedly sharing and comparing theirs with one another. Hmm…. Which of these things is not like the others?

Introvert status confirmed.

The more I learned about introverts, the more aha moments I had. Some of the most common traits and preferences of introverts include: being alone or with few people; drawing energy from within instead of from external stimuli; wanting plenty of personal space and downtime; listening and observing more than speaking; taking extra time to think before speaking or taking action; working well independently; rarely engaging in self-promotion; subduing external demonstration of emotions; and having limited contact with the public. I am ALL of these things.

Introvert status accepted.

According to the internet, nearly every species on Earth has both introverts and extroverts. Dogs. Gerbils. Humpback whales. Cave women, perhaps? Also, there’s more than one type of introvert. There are four — social, thinking, anxious, and inhibited — each excelling in different sets of professions. I think I’m actually a bit of all of these, which I hope means there are lots of jobs that I am suited for.

Thinking introverts spend a lot of time thinking and self-reflecting. They’re good aerospace engineers, social media managers, and fashion designers. Anxious introverts are nervous. They excel as statisticians, proofreaders, and, curiously, pilots. Inhibited introverts are rather slow, making them suited to be personal financial advisors, mental health or addiction counselors, geoscientists, zoologists, and content writers or authors. Finally, social introverts, for whatever reason, are thought to make good welders, commercial divers, motorboat mechanics, animal trainers, and plumbers. Deductive reasoning leads me to believe I’m mostly an anxious and/or inhibited introvert, so perhaps I have a future as a proofreader or maybe even a writer, though being a welder has a certain appeal that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Introvert status embraced.

For the past few years, I’ve worn my introversion if not loud, then definitely proud (in the safety of my own home, of course, where I don’t need to interact with people outside of my immediate family). And I’ve realized I shouldn’t beat myself up or feel inadequate. I was just barking up the wrong tree most of my life. Nurture couldn’t trump my nature. I like to sit at my computer in my pajamas writing all day long and don’t care to talk to anyone too much. I hate the telephone, and I space out in meetings. I don’t want clients, or to navigate office politics, or to hobnob to get ahead. I always thought I was supposed to thrive on those things, but I don’t and never have.

So, maybe the moral of the story and one of the many legacies of the women’s lib movement is that girls should be whatever they want to be when they grow up, whether that be a stay-at-home mom or a welder or a lawyer who moonlights as a baker. Without guilt, judgment, or feelings of inadequacy. While I’m grateful for the choices and opportunities and to those who fought so hard for them, no one should feel compelled to hunt when she prefers to gather. Or go against her grain. We should wholeheartedly support one another as we identify and pursue the track that’s right for us. Except, maybe, working the festival circuit.