Ep.37: What do you do?
Badgerlands.
10 days after my BBC exit my good friend Deirdre, another ex-BBC radio producer, comes to visit. On an achingly perfect late autumn day we clamber up the hill above The Byre and pick our way through the woods to badgerlands where we sit amongst amber leaves and rusty bracken to gaze at the loch, comparing notes. ‘I was fine until someone asked me what I do’, she shares, ‘I spent a long time defining myself by what I used to do, telling people how I used to make radio programmes for the BBC’.
I’ve been wondering a lot about what that moment will feel like, further down the line, when I too am asked what I do for a living. What will I reach for to frame an answer? I used to laugh and say that if you cut my head off, my neck would say BBC round it like a stick of rock, and I wonder whether I’ll feel the shadow of those words even after I’ve taken my thumb and rubbed them away.
Of course the reason ‘what do you do?’ is such a loaded question is the underlying implication that you may be judged on the answer. Its human nature to want to pin each other down, put each other into boxes, organise who is who and where each belongs. Whether we like it or not I think we’re creatures who shuffle ourselves into some kind of rank and hierarchy, which is why the kudos of working somewhere like the BBC leaves a sticky residue. It’s an impressive credential to have, it’s weighty. And I can’t deny that when I first started at the BBC in Glasgow on the 17th August 1995 it felt like the biggest achievement of my life – why else would I remember the exact date from so long ago? I remember repeatedly taking my BBC pass out just to stare at it in disbelief. It was yellow, I had long dark hair and I was wearing a black t-shirt under a soft light grey check pinafore dress. Joining the BBC was the dream ticket. On reflection I’m sure I probably waved those credentials around far too much over the years, drinking in the buzzy, excited response it always elicited, letting it all polish my ego.
And because of all that, I’ve always imagined that peeling away that association when the time came would be painful, but now, how I view myself has shifted. I think I used to have a pretty clear image of myself, an image which included working for the BBC for sure but also things like being fit and healthy and physically capable. At no point in my imagining did my definition of myself include even the thought that I was a person who could get cancer. But I did get cancer and it was so unexpected, so out of the blue shocking, that I feel I don’t quite trust anything I held as true before that precise moment. ‘You have invasive lobular carcinoma’, boom, you change, just like that.
‘I think it’ll be sad if you never present another programme’ Deirdre tells me, ‘you’re so good at it’. And while its nice to be told you’re good at something I know to my core I don’t need to present programmes, they’re fun to do and it’s been a great way to make a living but I also know I would be perfectly happy if I never present or produce another radio programme so long as I live. And that knowledge is utterly liberating. It turns out working for the BBC does not define me after all.
I suspect we define ourselves by the things that matter to us. The things which predominate push themselves to the front so you reach for them first when you form your own narrative. ‘Me pick me’ shouts the cycling part of my life, ‘you’ve cycled hundreds of miles’, ‘me pick me’, shout all the BBC science programmes I’ve made, ‘people know you for this, this must be up the top of the list’, so you pluck at these different parts then glue them together with things like ‘partner’, ‘mother’, ‘daughter’. After a cancer diagnosis what matters changes and in turn you un-hitch the unnecessary. Who am I? I’m mother to B, I’m partner to David. What do I do? Whatever makes B, David and me happy; whatever I want to feel alive; whatever I can to feel like I’ve not wasted a single precious day.
And because I feel so utterly liberated in terms of truly not caring about what other people think of me – because I’ve realised it really doesn’t matter – that question of ‘what do you do?’ holds no fear either. And when it comes, as it will, I suspect I will be quite comfortable in saying whatever comes into my head at that precise moment.