A box that fits well enough.

Let me tell you a story.

When Mark and his buddy were out in Colorado a couple of weeks ago, they hired a mountaineering instructor and climbing guide named Russell. Over the first couple of days of the trip, the three of them had plenty of time to chat — during the initial what-kind-of-climber-are-you conversation, during lunch, while driving up into the mountains — and Mark got to hear some of Russell’s life story.

Russell used to be an accountant. He went through business school, did well, had a well-paying job behind a desk. After six months, he decided he didn’t want that kind of life, so he quit his job and moved where he could work in the mountains. The work is hard and the money is unpredictable (besides all the guiding and instructing gigs, he also works as a substitute teacher), but he’s happier, he’s outdoors all the time, and he has more freedom — enough to be planning a five-week honeymoon in Europe, climbing the Alps with his bride.

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Russell’s story sounds like a trope, even though Russell is real. Maybe the story isn’t accurate — who knows? Maybe Russell really quit accounting because he wasn’t any good at it, or felt like a failure, or struggled with depression. Whatever the background, this is the story that Russell tells his clients — at least the ones who are athletic, professional-class middle-aged men.

It is a good story. I think it is a very acceptable story. In our culture at least, one way for a person who does not work a white-collar job to pass the “I am not a loser” test among white-collar people is to have this kind of story: I once was one of you, but I decided to escape the rat race and live a life with more freedom. Crucial to the acceptance-level of the story is some indication that the speaker could have chosen the conventional route — in this case, had actually chosen it for a while — but then freely decided to walk away from it. I’m a climbing guide sounds exciting enough, but I used to be an accountant, but now I am a climbing guide lends a whiff of adventurous respectability.

It works, I think, because enough professional-class people are dissatisfied with the frustrations of their daily lives that the story touches some unspoken fantasy of doing the same thing; or at least, a fair number of people can easily see how the mountains might call more compellingly than the spreadsheet. This is why so many people have hobbies.

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It occurred to me that my professional life story could be made to fall neatly into a similar trope — only instead of sailing the wide accountancy, I was embedded in engineering academia, and instead of quitting to head for the hills, I left to have babies and teach them as they grow. To me, the story has a similar “feel” to the accountant-turned-mountain-man trope. I passed the entrance tests, so to speak. I spent enough time on the inside to have a grasp of the kind of life I might lead if I stuck to my original plans. Importantly (for the narrative at least) I stayed long enough to acquire a credential, the proof that I walked away from it all by choice and not because the system chewed me up and spit me out. And I did behold two possible futures that stretched out before me, and reached out my hand and chose the one that I foresaw — for me — meant greater peace and greater happiness. Less money, and more freedom (of a certain type), and more love.

The trope doesn’t quite match up with the truth. (And who knows what details Russell the mountaineer left out of his story, to make his story ring so well, so that his listeners will slot him into the “ditched the rat race, found true happiness” box, which in America is a Good Kind Of Box To Be In, a noble working-class designation, if not the deserving poor, then the deserving mostly-broke). There is anxiety in the truth to my story; and an identity crisis; and the slow, terrifying grasping of Catholic teaching on marriage and how it was going to apply to the particularities of the marriage I was in; and the simultaneous appreciation of the needs and realities of children; and the trying-out, along the way, of unworkable halfway solutions where, I hoped, I might be able to keep one foot in each world.

The true story lacks the casualness of “I decided to walk away from all that.”

The casualness is a key feature of the narrative’s acceptability. The narrator establishes the self as cool and detached. I was anything but detached while it was all going on. I am, actually, pretty well detached from the old life now that it is so distant. I project that detachment back into the past as if I had it all along.

But maybe the pleasant trope, incomplete picture that it is, can be exploited. People will make snap judgments because this is what people do. Might as well get comfortable in a box that is reasonably close to the truth and has a fair chance of being looked upon with approval.

So.

I quit the rat race, and now I’m a somewhat-crunchy homeschooling mom, and I like it. That’s my story, and as long as you know me only superficially, I just may stick to it.

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