Monday Morning Career Counseling

Every Monday morning, I have a work meeting during which the team goes over individual updates from the week before. And every Monday morning in the thirty minutes leading up to this meeting, I question my career choices.

I wonder how and why I got into this field of work. I wonder if I should have given it more thought when I was fifteen. Or eighteen.

I think of the alternatives.

Over the course of the last three decades, I have considered being a mechanical engineer, gynecologist, librarian, psychologist, advertisement jingle writer, bus driver, food blogger, restaurant critic, model, theatre artist, teacher, standup comedian, photographer, stay-at-home person. The list is long, many Mondays have passed since I graduated from college.

I’ve also considered being a writer of some kind. Probably the only thing I am passionate about. And by passion, I mean an inclination to keep coming back to it, year after year.

Most weeks, by Wednesday, I am deeply focused on my work, staying up late into the night, writing and debugging code. Doing what I love about my job – building products, making things work, breaking them, fixing them.

Yet on Mondays, all I can think of are the things I dislike – the administrative work, the office politics, the drudgery behind shipping products.

I wonder if I would have felt the same way on Mondays if I had taken up writing full time? I wonder if I would have still found solace in writing as I do now, or would I have begun to dread putting words on blank pages?

I wish there was a way to peep into alternate realities. Just to see how life would have been if I had picked the other options. I wish there was a way to switch between these different realities. To live a little here, live a little there.

But one can only dream. And snap back to reality when a voice says, “Divya, do you have any updates?” to quickly say, “No. No, I don’t have any updates. I’m still trying to figure it out.”