It’s weird realising that there are certain professions for which you’re automatically, somewhat universally, respected for practicing – regardless of whether you’re any good at what you do or whether you work ethically. I’m thinking doctors and university professors – doctors more so. It must be a strange world to inhabit. I’m sure they must take that respect, which they encounter wherever they go and whomever they meet, for granted. It would be hard not to. If only everyone was afforded the same kind of respect and good assumptions about them.
I’m also realising that there are so many ‘nothing’ professions. Professions where, should the world be hit by a zombie apocalypse, the associated skills would serve no useful role. Accounting for example. And it’s interesting to note, just how many professions would become more important in such end-of-world scenarios, chefs for their ability to make scarce food available more palatable, entertainers for their ability to lift sprits in wretched times. The services of baristas would be more appreciated than those of programmers – as should of course always be the case.
At least with professions outside of the arts, professions with long rites of passage – surgeons, veterinary surgeons, scientists – there are necessarily going to be fewer imposters, fewer people in those professions who haven’t demonstrated years of devotion, dedication and loyalty to their craft. Those practicing these professions are also fortunate because circa half of those rites-of-passage years, training or lecturing, will tend to be remunerated. And you know what I think is best of all about those professions? Even better than the universal respect they tend to be rewarded with? They get to use their hands. Not just for typing but to make things, mend things and test things – there must be something so rewarding about getting to spend your life doing something so primal.
I say ‘imposters’ when I guess it makes no sense to declare people who do good work with fewer years behind them ‘imposters’. It’s far from uncommon, in the arts mostly, for a newcomer’s work to vastly surpass the quality of those with more years behind them. I suppose I’m realising just how easy it is for anyone to pop into a studio, write a couple of sentences down, sing a few takes, and a month or so later, be anointed universal acclaim and pronounced some kind of genius. I suppose they might well be. There must, however, be something that feels reassuringly safe about being in a profession such as surgery, a profession which requires you to have truly proven your devotion, and I kind of wish that the same was true of music, probably only because, I’ve given so much of myself to it.
Or perhaps a better way of surmising the sentiment of the above paragraphs would be to say:
“It would’ve been easier for me to be a neurosurgeon.”
LYNA GALLIARA 