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The Portfolio Life: When One Thing Was Never the Answer · After the Rush Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: There is a form on the clipboard in front of me.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: The kind you fill out in a waiting room while a television bolted to the wall plays
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: a cooking show with the sound off.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Name, date of birth.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then near the bottom,
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: one line printed narrow that says occupation with a blank about two inches long
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: after it.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm holding the pen over it.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Two inches.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: One word.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe two if I write small.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I have been an occupational therapist,
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: which means the form is asking me with a straight face for my occupation,
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: and I could give it a career's worth of them.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: I have run departments.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: I have taught at a university.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote grants, and then I ran a non-profit the grants paid for.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: I raised two boys, mostly by myself, starting before I was old enough to rent a car.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: None of that fits on the line.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, I do what everyone does.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: I pick the one that sounds most like an answer.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: I write it down, and I hand the clipboard back.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: I let that form decide who I am for the afternoon.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: That little blank has been following me my whole life.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: One line, one answer.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Pick the thing you are and be it.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is about the people who never quite managed to,
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: and the ones who are finally ready to stop trying.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to After the Rush.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Catherine McDowell.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: If this is the first time you found me, you've not walked in on the middle of anything.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: You can start right here.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Every episode is a door that can open from the outside.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Today, the door is a small one.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: It is that blank on the form and the quiet instruction underneath it that most
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: of us absorbed decades ago without ever noticing that a life is supposed
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: to have one answer.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Here is what the forum is really asking.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not what you do, who you are, reduced to a category a stranger can file.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And most of us learned to answer it early, because the world rewards a clean answer.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: The nurse, the teacher, the accountant, the man who owns the hardware store.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: You pick a lane, you get good at it.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: You let it become the first word people say about you at a party and
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: the first word you say about yourself.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: For a while that works.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: It is efficient.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: It tells people where to put you.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I understand the appeal from the inside because a single answer is a kind of rest.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: You stop auditioning.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know exactly what to say at the school pickup and the dinner party.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the class reunion.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: The world stop asking you to explain yourself because you have handed it
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: a word it already knows what to do with.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: The trouble shows up later and it shows up quietly because
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: a life built around one thing has exactly one thing holding it up.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in this chapter, the one I make the show for, the one thing has a way of moving.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: The title changes.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: The company reorganizes.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: The last kid moves into an apartment three states away and stops needing you
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: to answer the phone at 11 at night.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: The knee that let you do the work stops cooperating.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: I watched a man go through this.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: He had been a senior executive at a company you would recognize.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: For 30 years, that was the whole sentence.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: He was the job, and the job was him, and he wore it well.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Then he retired on a Friday with a cake in the break room,
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: and by the following Wednesday, he did not know what to do with his hands.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: He told me he was not joking.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: What he had started He was reorganizing the garage by category.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: He had run a division of 400 people and now he was alphabetizing paint.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not telling you that to be unkind.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: I liked him.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm telling you because he is the clearest picture I have of what happens when
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: a whole self gets poured into a single container and then the container goes away.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: I have watched the other version too.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: The one that does not come with a cake in the break room.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: A woman I know spent more than 30 years as the person everyone in her family called first.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Sick child.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: She was there.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Aging mother.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: She managed the long decline.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Her husband's calendar, the holidays, the weekend logistics, all of it ran through her kitchen.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: She was extraordinary at it, and it was honestly who she was, not a role she resented.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Then the children grew up, And grew capable.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Her mother passed, and the call simply stopped coming.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody threw her a party.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: There was no last day.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: The phone went quiet,
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: and she sat in the house that used to run like a switchboard,
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: and the silence was the loudest thing in it.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: She had spent her whole self on one thing.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and without complaint, and the one thing had grown up and left.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Two different people, same shape.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: The container emptied out and there was nothing else in the cupboard.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: I never had that problem and I want to be honest that it started as a lack, not a plan.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: When you are 17 and you have a baby and nowhere permanent to sleep,
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: you do not get to specialize.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: You do the thing in front of you and then the next thing,
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: and you hold three of them at once because any one of them could fall through.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: I learned to do the math out loud in real time.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: If I cannot afford to pay for this today in cash,
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: what makes me think I can pay for it later plus interest?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't buy the debt.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: That one sentence,
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: which I said to myself when I had almost nothing, is the reason I have choices now.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: But the habit underneath it turned out to matter even more than the money.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: I never learned to be one thing, because being one thing was a risk I could not afford.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: I put myself through school.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: I became a clinician.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Then I was running the department, then teaching the people who went on to run departments.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote a grant, which taught me I could write grants.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I started a nonprofit.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then I was the person raising money to keep my own idea alive.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Over a million dollars, one proposal at a time.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: For a stretch in there, I was living three of those lives at the same day.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Clinic in the morning,
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: a lecture in the afternoon,
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: grant language at the kitchen table once the boys were asleep.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Always with a good pen, because a good pen made the words feel official.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was a lot.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to pretend it was balanced or that I did it gracefully.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to say plainly that some of how it worked out was luck and timing.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Doors that happened to be open when I got to them.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: But I was never once in danger of becoming a single thing.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: It took me a long while to see the gift in that.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: None of it was a ladder.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be careful with that word.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because this culture loves a ladder.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: A ladder is one thing stacked on the same thing, higher.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: What I had was more like a set of keys on one ring.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Different keys cut for different locks, worn down to different shapes.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Every one of them opened a door to a life I actually lived.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: And none of them by itself was the whole of me.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there is a version of what I'm describing that is being sold very hard right now.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to separate myself from it because it wears similar clothes.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: The version being sold is called reinvention.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: You've heard it.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Reinvent yourself for your next act.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Become a multi hyphenate.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Build the portfolio career,
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: seven income streams, a personal brand, a whole new you for the second half.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: I understand why it is appealing because it points to something real,
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: which is that one lane was never enough, but it gets the diagnosis exactly backward.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Reinvention starts from the idea that you are not enough yet.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: That the person you have been needs to be taken apart and rebuilt
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: into someone more current, more optimized, more marketable.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: It looks at your 50 or 60 or 70 years and treats them as the first draft to be replaced.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: I don't believe that and I have never once seen it to be true.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: People I have watched build a good next chapter did not become someone new.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: They did the opposite.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: They stopped throwing pieces of themselves away.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think of a friend who spent her career as a litigator,
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: sharp and a little feared,
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: who played piano her whole life without ever letting account for anything.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: When she left the courtroom for the last time, everyone braced for her to be lost.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Instead,
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: she went looking for the 15-year-old who used to sit at the keys,
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: and it turned out the pianist and the litigator were the same careful,
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: stubborn woman the whole time.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: She did not become anyone new.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: She let a part of herself she had kept in a closet for 40 years walk back into
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: the main rooms of the house.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: That is the difference between reinvention and design.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Reinvention says tear it down and start over.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Design says you already have the materials,
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: you have had them for decades,
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: and the work is to arrange them so that no single one has
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: to carry your entire weight.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: The executive with the alphabetized paint did not need a new self.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: He needed the four or five other selves he had set down somewhere around age 40.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because a serious man was supposed to pick one thing and be it.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: A portfolio life is not a reinvention.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: It is a refusal.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: It is refusing to hand back the parts of you that did not fit on the form.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: I want to correct one more easy version of this because it is
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: the one I am most tempted by myself.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: It would be simple to say a portfolio life is just smart risk management.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Diversify your identity the way you diversify your money so that
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: when one thing fails, you have a backup.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: There is a grain of truth in it.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: A person with more than one source of meaning is genuinely harder to knock over.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: But that framing is too cold and it misses the point.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: You are not a balance sheet.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: The strands of a real life are not investments you are spreading around to lower your exposure.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: They are not held in reserve in case the main thing fails.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: They are the thing.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: The travel and the work and the people And the afternoon you spend teaching
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: a grandchild to whisk eggs are not a backup plan for your identity.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: They are your identity, all of them at once.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: And the stake was ever believing you had to rank them and pick a winner.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: My husband is 10 years ahead of me on this road, so I get to watch it up close.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: What some people would call his retirement I would call his portfolio finally
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: getting the hours it always deserved.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: He reads, he designs courses to teach massage therapy.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: He enjoys the vegetable garden and he loves to go to the gym and do yoga.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: He's not less than he was when he had a title.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: He is more of himself because more of him is allowed out of the house on a Wednesday.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the door and it's a small one, which is the only kind I trust.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: The next time you are handed a form with a narrow line on it,
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: or the next time you're at a party and someone asks what you do,
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: notice the little scramble that happens before you answer.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Notice yourself reaching for the one word that will file you cleanly.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then, just once, don't reach for it.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: You do not have to hand a stranger your whole ring of keys,
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: but you can decline to pretend you only have one.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Try it in private first if that is easier.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Take a piece of paper and instead of the one line, give yourself the whole page.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Write down every life you have actually lived.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: The paid ones and the unpaid ones.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: The one you were good at and quietly proud of and never got a title for?
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Do not rank them.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Just let them all be on the page at the same time in your own handwriting
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: with no blank two inches long forcing you to choose.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: I did this a while ago on the back of an envelope and I still have it.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's on my desk right now under a coffee cup that has left a brown ring across the corner.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: There are more lives on that than I would ever have fit on a form.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: I take it out and look at it more often than I plan to.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Not to admire, mostly to remember to add to it.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is an invitation.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Give yourself the whole page.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Then leave room at the bottom.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's the episode.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: If it landed,
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: the kindest thing you can do is send it to one person
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: who has been introducing themselves by the job they no longer have.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: You will know who.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: After the Rush lives on Substack,
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: where you can subscribe and read the essay that runs alongside this one.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you want the workbook and other things I have built for this chapter of life,
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: they are at aftertherush.store.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: Come in through any door.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: They all lead to the same room.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Catherine McDowell.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you next time.