Stop! Don't Ask Me What I Do!

Or... New questions might generate new answers.

Someone’s forehead scrunched up across a restaurant table. “But what do you DO?”

“We’re in the CIA,” I said.

It satisfied him. It also ended the conversation, which was exactly the point. I knew why he was asking, and he wasn’t going to get throat-clearing and defensiveness from me.

This is Nico. She has a different answer ready for every table, and she's very good at all of them. That's the problem.

I sold my business in 2015, when I was 45. My husband is older than me and had already retired. Our daughter had moved out and away. We were lucky enough to be financially stable, and we’d been living abroad for years anyway, so we did the obvious thing and just went where the wind took us. Scotland with my mother-in-law. Summers in Italy, in the house my husband’s great-grandfather built. Friends scattered around the globe (many happily welcomed us to their couches).

This confused people. Especially in the US, where identity is so often welded to working life. We’d meet a friend of a friend, or fall into conversation in a restaurant, or get chatting on a trip, and there it was every single time, with the scrunched up forehead: but what do you DO?

So the CIA line started as a joke, but turned into a very useful policy to use when someone asked the dreaded question. Along with that question’s cousin, “where are you from?” They could put us in a nice, safe little box, and we could move on without having the entire conversation become about us and how weird we were.

Because that’s what the question is about really isn’t is? Putting us all in neat little labeled boxes. I often think that underneath the polite curiosity there might be something less polite, because some people find our life and how we live it a bit offensive (like, what do you mean you don’t come from anywhere? Where do you live? Where is your house?) We don’t follow the rules. How dare we? We are supposed to DO something specific so people can tell who we are. Big letters, capital and bold. What do you DO? As if that is the only important thing in life, as if our instant identities are our identities, forever and ever, Amen.

Listen. I’m no innocent. “What do you do” is a question I turn to all the time. I mean it’s a shortcut, right? It tells you really quickly who to be in the presence of that person.

Oh Jeez. Do you see what I just wrote there and I didn’t even know it was about to come through my fingers.

We ask other people what they do so that we can figure out who to be. I’m such a people pleaser.

Don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean. If my conversation partner tells me they are a professor, I immediately shift to the Dr. Cabrelli of Lisa-Marie. It eases my imposter syndrome. If they tell me they are a banker, I can lean in on the boring finance stuff I am secretly interested in, but don’t talk about because we aren’t supposed to talk about money (a rule that costs midlife women more than we could ever calculate). If they tell me they’re a Mom, I can relax and talk about my kid.

Here’s the problem with that. I am becoming the person I think they want me to BE, based solely on a single sentence about what they DO.

And it’s all so dumb. Maybe the professor wants to ask about the traveling so she can work out what to do with her summer. Maybe the banker wants to tell me about the garden she’s growing on her apartment balcony. Maybe the home-maker wants to ask me advice on her side-hustle.

We’ll never find out. She’s performing her instant identity, I’m performing whoever I’ve decided she wanted, and neither one of us is being our true selves.

I wrote a while back about the dangers of Instant Identity, and the comments underneath it told me plenty about what you’re all struggling with. Some of you read “what do you do?” as the asker deciding whether you’re worth the time. Some of you said you feel actual panic now, because you no longer have a ready answer. One woman said that the moment people work out they can’t use her for networking, they lose interest.

So it isn’t just innocent small talk. That question is a Threshold Guardian that stands at the door of every room and decides who gets in.

So how do we kill it?

We don’t. We replace it.

I’ve been trying this one: what’s your favorite thing you do with your time?

Or these, which might be better, because of what’s built into them. What’s had your attention lately? What are you into at the moment? What are you spending your time on this year?

Lately. At the moment. This year. Every one of these questions makes the answer expire eventually, and that’s the entire point. An Instant Identity is supposed to be permanent, which is precisely why it panics you when it’s gone. A Slow Identity is allowed to... go slow. Slowly sweetly, with lots of savoring. It’s allowed to hold more than one journey (because you’re on several not just one), and it’s allowed to be swapped out when you like without anybody having to announce a reinvention. We’re in our second coming-of-age, and unlike the first one, we already know that what you do is not who you are.

I’m adding Slow Identity to the Midlife Heroine’s Dictionary.

Now here’s the part I might be wrong about...

I don’t think this question lands on men the way it lands on us. A man who says “not much these days” gets called lucky (my husband gives the answer, “whatever the f**k I want.”). He’s living the dream, he’s obviously done the hard work to deserve what he’s got now. A woman who says “not much these days” gets the same furrowed confused brow, a visible recalibration, and a hand on the shoulder before they turn away. Same answer. Different verdict.

I’d like us to shift the paradigm and try the new question. I’ll go first.

“Hey LM, what’s your favorite thing you do with your time?”

“I like to create, and mostly that means writing. Fiction for myself, essays to reach other people. But I also build businesses, which is my secret passion. I don’t really build my own anymore, I’ve got far too many “retired person” things to get through, but I get so much pleasure out of building them with other people.”

Your turn. Let’s meet each other in this safe room filled with other human BEings.

JOURNAL PROMPT: (You can write in your journal or, even better, share it below. We’re all one of the same journeys right now)

“What’s your favorite thing you do with your time?”

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