What Do You Do?

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 12:07:24 +0000

The question “What do you do?” is pretty much the first thing people ask one another when they meet for the first time. It says a lot about you and is usually a nice easy way of launching into conversation. Having been unable to work throughout my adult life due to ME, I used to dread the question, until I chanced upon a better way of responding to it.

If I give a truthful and straightforward answer, it usually results in a conversation that I didn’t want to have in the first place.

“I am unable to work because of health problems” inevitably leads to “What health problems?”, if it doesn’t just stop the conversation dead. Naming my condition almost always provokes “What’s that then?” – and a full interrogation of my medical history.

Eventually, the person might move on to little pearls of wisdom that I’m sure many of us endure; wisdom about the impairment we have lived with for years from people who have only just heard about it.

“Have you tried homeopathy? That was good for my acne” or “I’m sure there must be something you can do if you looked a little harder”.

Then there’s the fact that I’ve been living off the state. A disabled friend once described explaining their incapacity to a stranger in a pub only to be confronted with an aggressive “So I’m paying for that beer you’re drinking with my taxes?” Though nothing like this has happened to me, I have always been afraid that this is what people were really thinking.

My profound lack of achievement bothered me too – I felt I had nothing to tell about myself. I had been a good student at a very academic school, although my true passions were writing, music and most especially drama. I had imagined I would be able to do everything; appease my parents with a degree in some navel-gazing subject then get onto the stage – perhaps via the Cambridge Footlights!

Alas, to date I have just three GCSEs to my name, I haven’t set foot on a stage since I became ill at fifteen, and I have never had a job. I always assumed that other people would be as disappointed in me as I was, should they discover the truth.

So I would skirt around the question and try to change the subject as tactfully as I could. If the conversation was guaranteed to be a short one, in a taxi or at a bus stop, I would say, “I work in an office” – something I had observed to be a commonplace euphemism for “My job is of little interest to me and even less interest to you, so let’s say no more about it”.

Otherwise I would try to deflect the “What do you do?” question with quips like: “As little as humanly possible” or “I’m really a hired assassin, but I don’t like to talk about work out of hours,” and watch people shuffle away.

But when they did stick around and I continued to evade the question, I would come across as having something to hide, or else as being too socially clumsy or just plain rude to answer an apparently simple question. The more embarrassed I was, the more embarrassing the situation would become. And when I saw this happening, all I could do was to go back to the line about being unable to work and endure the very conversation I had been trying to avoid, except this time I looked like an idiot from the outset.

When eventually I joined the Open University, I really embraced the status of student even though I never saw a union bar or a lecture hall.

And to my delight, most people seemed happy to go along with my chosen take on the situation. I could be honest about the fact I only studied a few hours every week because I was unwell, and people usually showed far more interest in my studies than my health problems.

Eventually a major relapse forced me to abandon my course. After a while, I started to write a story – in bed, on my laptop – and within four months I had produced an 80,000 word first draft. The draft was full of shocking inconsistencies; characters vanishing midway through the story, one character cropping up after he had died and similarly preposterous events. However, despite spending most of my time in bed suffering from what seemed to be the worst relapse ever, I had suddenly become something – I was a struggling novelist!

Writing a novel was something I was prepared to tell people about and that they wanted to hear. So when it came to “What do you do?” conversations, my incapacity faded into insignificance.

All of a sudden, I began to figure out that my earlier conversation-killing experiences weren’t about my joblessness or some great fascination with my medical history. The problem lay in the unhelpful subject matter I was presenting people with. “I am unable to work because of health problems” is an opener to a conversation about health problems and not much else.

It wasn’t that my life had been empty before, rather that it just hadn’t occurred to me that any of my pursuits were worth mentioning, not compared to other people’s proper jobs. I had written poetry and pieces for charity magazines, I had painted pictures, composed songs and ran an online support group, as well as trying to finish my education, but I hadn’t recognised “What do you do?” as an opportunity to talk about any of these things.

So next time somebody asks you “What do you do?”, bear in mind that they are just trying to engage you in small talk. It isn’t necessary to define ourselves by our paid employment or lack of it. Consider what sort of conversation you want to have and remember that you are free to define yourself however you like.

DH Kelly | ukwatch.net

What Do You Do?