The Purpose of Imaginary Lives

As part of weaving in and out of a creative life for the last decade or so, I’ve made a few passes through Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way. It’s a self-help book about sparking (or more accurately rediscovering) your creativity, and it’s full of gems, but there’s one exercise I’ve always particularly enjoyed. She tells her readers to grab a piece of paper and list off five alternate lives for themselves: five things you daydream about doing, and then consider how you might be able to incorporate pieces of them into your everyday life.

The list’s always been easy for me. Off the top of my head today, if my life weren’t full of the things it’s full of right now, I think it might be cool to be:

• an interior designer

• a forest school teacher

• a State Department employee (well, maybe not RIGHT now in Jan 2025, but in another era) who speaks eight languages

• a curriculum developer

• a museum curator

I do have bits and pieces of all of those people in the life I’ve got right now. But I’ve also got way more books on all of these subjects than would probably be the case for most people who aren’t planning to start a career in the subject.

In part, that’s because those interests— color and design, nature and animals, words and language, education and sharing cool facts with other people—have been in my mental stable, in some form, for a long time, alongside rules and laws, medicine, comparative religion, Western astrology, and of course names. But I’ve had plenty of other special interests over the years. The ones that I tend to go to when I’m considering the question of “imaginary life” are the ones that are least transient, and least purpose-driven. As it turns out, those are also usually the ones that feel least wild to contemplate through the lens of a career change.

Like almost all autistic people, I’ve had pop culture special interests all my life. The Wizard of Oz (original book and 1939 movie; yes, I’ve read and seen Wicked, play and film, yes I love it </digression>), the Beatles (Team John), the Rocky Horror Picture Show (the only time my college friends ever heard me curse), the Babysitters Club (my eight-year-old just started reading this series and it’s been such fun to share a fandom with her!). My family might’ve thought it was weird for me to watch the same movie a hundred times (Wizard of Oz, Lion King, Sound of Music, Jesus Christ Superstar, Rocky Horror…) but they never assumed it meant I must be considering a career as a tin man.

And as a writer, I’ve had many research-driven special interests that ebb and flow. For a while, I had an entire small bookshelf dedicated to books on medieval living, weaponry, falconry, and sailing, because I was writing a book with a protagonist who did those things. I paid to attend a falconry weekend at West Coast Falconry (amazing experience, for the record); I paid to go out on a small schooner on San Francisco Bay (also awesome). When people asked “so how are you planning to keep a hawk in the suburbs?” I could say “oh, I’m not, I’m writing a book,” and that’d be the end of it.

I’ve read a lot in the last few years about how modernity doesn’t allow us to have hobbies without trying to monetize them, but I haven’t seen as much on how we’re not really allowed to have interests, either. If there’s something you’ve been interested in for many years, and it’s not a branded property, and you can’t say it’s because it’s for a book, people tend to say “Oh, you should do something with that professionally.”

I know this train of thought well: I’ve caught myself thinking it many times.

Since I became a fully non-employed person, the year before my daughter was born, I’ve had the thought every time a particular kind of interest pops up. With some things—like the forest school—it’s in the context of “I wish something JUST LIKE THIS were available; maybe I should make it myself” (in the spirit of Toni Morrison’s quote about writing the book you want to read, but with many more credentials required). In the last couple years, since having more friends living the freelancer life, it’s more often been along the lines of “I wonder if I could get paid for doing this?”

I’ve revisited a lot of these thoughts in the last few months, as my husband and I consider what we want our income streams to look like going forward. I’ve had the thought, more than once, “oh, maybe I could start a forest school co-op. Oh, maybe I could teach kids online. Oh, maybe I could take one of my special interests and make money from it.”

Thing is… I’ve tried that before. I had one not-super-successful interior design consult with a friend. In search of credentials for running some sort of early childhood program, I applied to Tinkergarten (felt awkward as soon as I had to go on camera in my application; rejected) and then did about two-thirds of a Lifeways training program (amazing; not what I needed in the end). Because I was never all that interested in being an early childhood teacher. Sure, I wanted there to be a forest school program that my kids and I could go to. And—I now realize—I wanted to imagine what it’d be like to run the program, to be a nature mentor like the ones in Jon Young’s Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature. To imagine being the sort of person who could crawl under a bush and stay there for an hour and get six five-year-olds to do the same. But that didn’t mean I wanted to lead educational activities with preschoolers or knit a farmyard blanket. I wanted to read some books, and maybe for my kids to have the experience, but I didn’t want the whole package any more than I wanted to spend every weekend with a hawk on my arm.

I’m going to keep thinking about ways I might want to make money, because it’s a useful thing to have in your back pocket in this capitalist society of ours. But if I end up cultivating a side gig that’s tied to a special interest, it’ll be one of the ones where I’ve already got the qualifications and where I know I mostly enjoy all the pieces: writing, editing, research, or something with names (anybody out there looking for a baby shower gift? I know a gal who helps parents make a list of baby names…). The other ones that my brain keeps telling me could turn into an income stream—naturalist studies, community-building work, emergency preparedness—those are for me, and my family, and my community. I’m probably not going to make money from them. And that’s just fine.

That said, if anyone reading this wants to start a Coyote’s Guide-style forest school in my area, I am IN.

And reach out to me about curriculum planning any time, cuz I’m great at that.