Welcome to the Exciting Game of Career Girls
What we wanted to be when we grew up, and who we actually became.
“How can anybody know how they got to be this way?” I’ve always thought that lyric from the National’s “Daughters of the Soho Riots” would be the perfect epigraph for a memoir, nearly any memoir. Becoming someone is complicated—perhaps you’ve noticed—and can rarely be explained by a seductive single cause.
Which doesn’t stop us from trying to narrate ourselves to ourselves. During the years I spent writing my forthcoming (September 12th!) book Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career, I thought a lot about the path I took from bright, anxious grade-schooler to bright, anxious tech executive, and found it populated with everything from Supreme Court decisions to popular movies to high school teachers who sometimes believed in me and sometimes very vocally did not.
I also remembered a board game my friends and I used to play called What Shall I Be?: The Exciting Game of Careers for Girls. The goal was to succeed in one of six possible Girl Careers: Teacher, Nurse, Stewardess, Model, Actress, and Ballerina. (We all know dozens of full-time ballerinas, don’t we? Half my LinkedIn connections are currently in rehearsals for Coppelia.) I loved the game, but in a queasy way. Growing up to be a model or actress seemed pretty unlikely. I definitely knew professional dancing wasn’t in my future. And I didn’t want to spend my life pouring coffee in an airplane or teaching schoolkids. (I worshipped my teachers, but somehow knew even then that it was a thankless job.) Which left Nurse, a profession I was absolutely too squeamish to contemplate.1
Also, even by age eight, I knew I wanted something big out of my career. Adventure, power, challenge. Money, too. So What Shall I Be? was an early reckoning with the fact that however I ended up earning a living, it probably wasn’t going to fit in some neat girl box.
Decades later, it’s clear that hardly any working woman fits in a neat girl box. And as I thought about my own path from there to here, I got curious about other women’s stories. Here’s the outcome: The Exciting Game of Career Girls, a limited-run Substack in which interesting women tell you what they wanted to be when they grew up…and what actually ended up happening.
Every Tuesday through Exit Interview’s pub date (and possibly beyond), you’ll hear from a new woman, including a would-be monk turned pediatrician, a wine pro who founded an alternative school, and a Brit whose Thatcher-era childhood led to work in suicide prevention. Their stories are fascinating, occasionally infuriating, and authentically inspiring.
Let me know what you think in the comments, and please share with friends! (It’s free.) And if you’d like to nominate someone to be featured, drop me a line at Kristi.c.coulter@gmail.com. (Nominating yourself is totally legit, by the way.)
Talk soon,
Kristi
There was also a boys’ version of the game. The Boy Careers: Athlete, Engineer, Doctor, Scientist, Astronaut, Statesman. Yes, statesman. The girls got hosed.