Fashion School Diaries : 1

"Fashion School Diaries" was an idea for a series of posts I have been thinking about for a long time. I admittedly was feeling quite shy about writing about this particular topic, but I would really like to write a series of posts about this topic. I want to also remember this time and writing about it will help.

It seems funny to call it "fashion school", but that seems to be the best description. I have been taking classes at two separate schools, beginning in 2018. At that time I had been taking courses at the Boston School of Fashion Design. The school has been operating since the 1930s in Boston teaching classes in the mechanics of fashion: sketching, construction of garments, draping, and pattern-making. I first began learning about garment sewing when I was in junior high. I never really had opportunity to take coursework in garment sewing, but would have loved that at the time. I wanted to make clothes so badly! Taking courses at the Boston School of Fashion Design was initially something I was doing for fun to improve my sewing skills. Overtime, it became so much more important to me, and I started remembering back to when I was a young teenager and all I wanted to do was stitch and sew.

For over twenty years, I had been working in a medical-based profession, which I had decided to do in high school. The career aptitude tests that I had taken during high school didn't indicate that I was interested in a medical/education based field, but for some reason that was what I felt that I should do. It seemed a very straight forward path for having a job, and because you are trained for one particular skill there was no ambiguity as to what you would be doing when you finished school. I love learning, and thought that the subject matter was okay. I am not sure if at this point in my life I would have even questioned it because that is what I had decided, and I felt that I couldn't change my mind.

In my junior year of college, it was time to work on our clinical placements. I wasn't feeling excited, it was more that I was so nervous. I remember that autumn afternoon so clearly after I saw my first two clients trying to make my way back across the campus to my dorm room without crying. The sessions had gone well, my clinical instructor had told me, and she thought that I had started to establish rapport with both of the clients. Why I was crying was because deep in my heart I knew that I didn't enjoy it. I felt so uncomfortable and while the clients were lovely people, I didn't like the feeling of the client/professional relationship. I persevered though. On a trip to New York City that spring with my mom to look at graduate schools, I hated myself for wishing that I could have worked in fashion design or in hotel management. I was so inspired by everything I was seeing in New York City from the fashions to the hotels, I just remember wishing that my college had those kind of majors, and maybe it wasn't too late to switch. These thoughts tormented me, and I suffered terribly from insomnia my last two years of college. I masked this by using that time at the library to study and in a way working in this way became my refuge. I was very invested and committed, and even though there was a nagging that I was feeling, I continued on. I was going to finish my program, and was very focused on being accepted into a well-known graduate program. While I was in graduate school, I remember a fellow classmate withdrew after three weeks, and I wished that it could have been me. The stakes were much higher at the graduate school level, and I knew that it would require all of my commitment. I was also so worried about the student loans that I had signed to attend graduate school as well. I was supposed to be happy, I had worked hard and this was what I was supposed to do I kept telling myself. To ease my mind, I became very interested in walking as a form of exercise, and since I was living in Chicago at the time, I would spend hours on the weekend or after classes walking along Lake Michigan. In the evenings, I would stitch on little cross-stitch or embroidery projects I kept hidden in a totebag in my closet.

Entering the professional world was not as hard a transition from being in school. I knew that to be the professional I wanted that it would take hard work, and I compensated for my lack of enjoyment by going to professional development courses, attending conferences, etc. I switched jobs and tried different employment settings, and when I was feeling so unhappy in the profession, switching jobs to become 'proficient' in another patient setting was a passable and plausible excuse. My profession became to me like an ill-fitting sock. The heel maybe in the wrong place, but you can eventually ignore it, until you remember that the sock is on upside down.

Another solution to my uncomfortableness became going back to school. I thought that if I only had to do my career part-time, and could do another career part-time that that would be a way to tolerate it. This seemed like a brilliant solution! I could pick something 'adjacent' to my clinical career and see if that would work. That did work for about ten years. I now know that working and staying busy has always been my go-to coping mechanism. As long as I kept things moving in this way it was okay. What I thought was my hobby was attending professional development in my two fields of work. I kept telling myself that I just needed to focus on these two careers and I would eventually feel okay about them.

That was not how things ended up. I was just so tired. I couldn't keep up the pace anymore. I went back to working full-time in my original career, but changed settings completely. My adjacent career proved to have transferable skills to develop and coordinate a state-wide program.

I dove head first into this. I had some other life changes happening at the time, and this was going to be my perfect opportunity. I was going to spend the remainder of my career (which is still over two decades left!). doing this work, and it was going to be fine. My interest in needlework, and fashion and all of those things can become just a hobby. But I decided, I wasn't going to hide my interest anymore. I had thought for so long that if I had outside interests that it would be taking away from the work in my career. What really was happening was that I was afraid to do these things because it just showed to me how poor a fit my career really was. In this new position, I became aware of so many things about my profession and how members of a certain community are treated currently and historically by members of this profession. I prefer not to go into the details here, but it became an ethical issue for me personally. Here was a profession I had dedicated most of my adult life to, and even served on a state board with the national accrediting organization, and I had been unaware of this perspective. I felt so ashamed. I tried to work through this by advocating as much as I could and tried to provide education to stake-holders related to my role to try to help change perspectives.

A few years went by. I learned more how to balance work much better so that I had more of a personal life. Work with a needle and all things sewing related became even more of a refuge than it ever had. I had been to our profession's national conference and attended a presentation on burnout. It was life-changing. I tried implementing the techniques I learned while I was at work, and it helped to open my mind to see other possibilities for my work.

One reading this may be asking, why was work/career so important to you? I could have taken a back seat and just not taken everything related to work so seriously, but that rubs against my value system. I admire people who have professions that are truly a job and a way to earn money and nothing more. I love working. I have always loved working, and as you can see even in jobs that I didn't really like! I was really looking for something that could be my vocation or my calling. That is what was missing the entire time. If I could look at jobs and careers as just something I clock in and out of, then I probably would have not had the immense discomfort that I did.

Around six years I was trying to work on my burnout at this profession, I began to think about what I truly wanted, if I could have or be anything I wanted, what would that be? I thought back to that time in New York City. I thought about the results printout of an aptitude test that I found stuck between the pages of an old high school yearbook. Lastly, I began systematically planning and figuring out- how could I make a career change into what I always wanted, what I wanted all those years ago as a young teenager?

I think that it is clear where this story is headed, but I will complete it in part 2. Thank you so much for reading! xoxo, ~Jaime