What if it didn’t have to “make sense”?
Today's essay is about my Aunt Sonja + how her path inspired my own.
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In the 1960’s, when my Aunt Sonja graduated college (with a major in French and a minor in German), she figured teaching would “make sense” as a career.
After all, most of her family worked in education.
But after graduation, she realized…she didn’t actually want to teach. So she started graduate school – first in French, then in Comparative Literature (because she thought one of those would “make sense”). But she didn’t really like grad school.
What would “make sense” instead?
She took a break and worked as a cocktail waitress for a year, and still wasn’t sure. Maybe being a librarian would “make sense”? That was still education-related, after all.
She got a scholarship to library grad school, but then had trouble finding a job. She found work as a secretary, but the way female secretaries were treated in that era — the early 1970’s — infuriated her. So she went back to school, to be a lawyer this time.
But it worried her: did being a lawyer “make sense,” given her college major? Her library degree? Her work history?
But she plowed ahead anyway, and it turned out she was good at it and enjoyed it — becoming a partner at a fancy, high-powered firm.
Several years and two kids later, she took a leave of absence from her firm — another move she worried didn’t “make sense.” Then she had another kid…
It was only 5 years after that, when she finally ended her “leave” by quitting the firm, that she finally leaned into the idea that maybe things didn’t have to “make sense.”
In the years since, she developed what she now calls the “shiny object theory of life” – meaning: it doesn’t have to make sense. It’s okay to follow what is shiny.
“Shiny object theory” has led my Aunt Sonja to, in the past few decades:
Found a school, even though she never actually worked in education
Take an acting class, having never acted before
Found a theater company focused on new plays with meaty roles for older women — including many that she directed and/or starred in.
Attend the Yale School of Drama to study directing (the year she qualified for Medicare)
…
She told me the story of her life, and all of the moves that “didn’t make sense,” as we had breakfast at her kitchen in New Haven.
Aunt Sonja + I on Zoom recently
On a personal level, Aunt Sonja’s insights —
That our life choices don’t have to make “sense” within the narrative of our life,
That we can take wild twists and turns, and follow the shiny objects, simply because we want to,
And that those twists + turns can be what makes our lives most meaningful
— were something that I really needed to hear at the time, sitting in that sunny New Haven kitchen, while Aunt Sonja was attending the Yale School of Drama.
I was in my “ka-boom” phase of my mid-twenties, where I didn’t seem to want anything that “made sense” with what I’d done before. And this really freaked me out.
So I wanted to share her reminders here, in case you need to hear it, too:
You are allowed to make decisions that don’t make “sense” within the narrative of your life.
You are allowed to make twists and turns that are inconsistent with your resume.
I’m not advocating for wildly impulsive decisions. But I think we all know the difference — there can be profoundly “right” decisions, that might look from the outside like they “don’t make sense.”
Aunt Sonja – and I — would say: go for it.
p.s. I specialize in working with people who are already pretty “together” in their lives — paying their bills, meeting their commitments. But just because your life looks pretty good on paper, doesn’t necessarily mean that it feels right to you, from the inside out. Learn more here.
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