RISKS AND REWARDS OF NEW DIRECTION OF YOUR WORK
Some men change the direction of their life because pain pushed them out of a situation that had become unbearable. They may not discover a better alternative until after making this break, as we have seen. Other men change because they feel pulled toward something more meaningful: a deeper commitment, a different intellectual interest; more creative freedom; or a calmer way of life. Even so, they too will experience pain. They are giving up something familiar for something unknown. They are taking a risk. Men who have made such moves say the rewards ultimately outweigh the risks. But, they insist, uncertainty and sacrifice are part of the package. If a man who makes a major change ignores either, he will be sadly disillusioned.
“Society has you pigeonholed, and if you want to get out it’s very hard,” says Dr. Harold Lear who, at age forty-seven, scrapped his lucrative medical practice as a urologist to enroll at the University of Pennsylvania for postgraduate training in psychiatry and sexual therapy.
In retrospect, his decision to give up a steady income astonishes even him. “I was always concerned with money,” he says. “I always had to be. And then to decide the hell with it was just incredible!” He actually entered school before being sure the funding he had applied for would come through. For six months he and his wife lived on a very stringent budget, and even borrowed money, until he finally did receive a NIMH grant. Finding an organization to fund him in the first place was difficult, says Lear, who is convinced he got the grant partly because one of the NIMH agencies was fascinated by the fact that “this character had actually quit his practice and was studying without any income whatsoever.”
Before leaving the hospital in Connecticut where he had worked, Lear encountered some dramatic reactions from his colleagues. “Some people were very supportive,” he says, “but others resented me and became very hostile.”
Lear emphasizes that his move into a new field was made only after he had seriously re-evaluated his own talents and interests, and had gotten advice from people whose opinions he respected. His move was prompted partly by the realization that “I was working hard to make money to get away from working hard to make money. And that cycle seemed crazy!” Enthusiastic about his new life, he adds: “I also found that if you’re doing the same thing constantly there is a deterioration. Change is a renewal, and this whole experience has been fantastic. A sheer joy. It’s been the most rejuvenating thing I’ve done since I’ve been in practice!”
Some men who make a mid-life shift turn an avocation or creative talent into a second career. Though previously trained in or dedicated to painting, music, acting, or writing, they generally have had to abandon their creative calling and find other work to support their family. Later, when they feel financially secure, or their children are launched, they may turn again to their art. Often, however, this decision means trimming the budget and simplifying the family’s lifestyle.
When Harding Lemay left his job, at forty-five, as vice president of Knopf publishing house to devote himself to his own writing, he did so in part, he says, because “nothing at work nourished my self-respect or held my attention.” He also found himself becoming increasingly irritable (“I would come home a snarling beast”) after spending his days being nice to people he didn’t like. Describing what finally led him to resign, he says:
There is something every man feels uses the best in him. And I think we become very mean people, men do,
if we’re not living up to what we think we are. If you, don’t like what you do then you don’t like what you are. I’m absolutely certain of that. And if you don’t like who you are, your poor wife and kids pay for it.
That’s what really forced me into examining it, and then saying, “If this is really what I want then I’m not the kind of guy I want to be.” And once a man reaches that point, then I think the next step is almost automatic.
The summer after he quit, Lemay went with his family to their summer home on Fire Island to begin writing his autobiography, Inside, Looking Out. The envy he aroused startled him. “The curious thing was the number of men who came up to me,” he says. “Surgeons, lawyers, advertising men— men who were making much more money than I was, averaging $50,000 to $150,000 a year, and who had magnificent occanfront houses. Out of about 200 families there, I must know 100 men well enough to talk to. And that summer I don’t think there was a man under 50 who didn’t stop me. The conversation usually centered on, ‘How did you have enough guts to do it?’ ”
Sensitive to the fear of taking such a risk that provoked these queries, Lemay stresses that he left his job primarily because he had something “tugging” him away—something more important to pursue. And before making his move he had already written five full-length plays. “I don’t think I would have had enough guts to jump into a new life without having explored it,” he insists. “I don’t think you do it unless you’ve had years of hoping or wanting to. It’s not an easy decision. It really isn’t.”
Although changing careers at mid-life is generally thought to be a choice that only the affluent can afford, or would even desire, there is evidence that many blue-collar workers feel a similar need for renewal and more freedom of movement at this stage of life. In fact, their wish for change is often so strong that they are willing to undergo considerable hardship in order to make the switch. That, at least, is the case with a group of two hundred policemen and firemen in New York City who are training for second careers as professional nurses.
Designed to reduce the personnel shortage in nursing and attract more men to the field, this unique experimental program at Hunter College-Bellevue School of Nursing is federally funded, which means the men do not have to pay for their training. Still, the sacrifices they made to prepare for their mid-life switch are most impressive. Their rigorous schedule requires attending classes 3 nights a week for 2 years, in addition to working full-time. Keeping abreast of their reading and studying cuts into their weekends and sharply curtails time spent with their families. And, most humiliating, these men have had to adjust to moving from a supermasculine career into one considered feminine.
‘The first group that came to us were very brave,” says Professor Louise Jennings, the project’s director. “They were laughed at and called ‘Nancy Nurse’ by their colleagues. But now that they’ve broken the ice, more men in their departments are interested.” (Because the younger men rejected this course initially, the average age of the first class was forty-five; in the second it was thirty-five.)
Generally these men were attracted to the program because they knew employment would be guaranteed when they finished, and because they found the prospect of traveling to different parts of the country appealing. Planning to supplement their retirement pension with income from their new career, they see themselves working in different capacities: in emergency or operating rooms; in industry or schools; or even becoming owners of nursing homes.
Their reasons for enduring this grueling study routine vary, but most say that staying on the job for more than twenty years is much less feasible today than in the past. Policemen stress violence and social change, and firemen underscore health hazards and the physical toll. Wanting to find another work direction for the future, some of these men had already tried various business ventures, without much luck. Others were even willing to spend their own money for training—to become an X-ray technician, for example—but found that full-time study was required. Thus for men without a college education, this opportunity to become a professional nurse was welcome indeed.
“When I heard about this course it was like somebody opened a window in a closed-up room!” said one policeman. “I could breathe. I could see a way out for myself.” In his view the sacrifices that he is making now are well Worth the satisfactions he envisages for the future:
It took a lot to sign up for this course, knowing the reaction we had to face back at the stationhouse. You have to have some guts to go ahead and say I’m going to change my whole conception of what I want to do, how I want to fulfill myself. At one stage of my life, money was the big thing, but I’m not interested in the cash value of life anymore.
Like me, some of the guys are going around the clock. There are days you go to work, go to school, go home to sleep—and start again at 5 a.m. It’s tough, and you’re putting in a lot of time and effort. If a guy wants to change his job he has to have moxie. And if he doesn’t, he’s never going to do it!
I’ve spent seventeen years of my life missing everything. If there was a picnic or a wedding or a christening I always had to say, “No.” I was working. Now I’ll have a job where I can say, “Yes!” And maybe I’ll just work three or four days a week, and home will be wherever me and my wife want it to be. We’ll be free!
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