Talking to My Friends on the Phone Led to My Calling—Writing and Teaching

By Andrea Askowitz

My daughter, Tashi, just finished her first year of college. Over spring break, my dad asked her what she wants to study. “Dad stop,” I said and threw my arm in front of his chest to block him. The number of times this 19-year-old has been asked what she wants to study is in the hundreds. It pisses her off because she doesn’t know yet. It pisses me off too.

For years, and I mean like my whole life, I didn’t know what I wanted to study either, and when the question came up, I always felt like there was something wrong with me.

I made it through college, barely. I majored in psychology because like Lucy from the Peanuts, I thought it would be fun to solve my friends’ problems. Turned out, studying psych meant learning about dead guys like Freud and Jung and was dead boring.

After college, I landed a job as a junior lobbyist for an environmental group. My job required convincing Congress people to expand the list of banned toxic chemicals, but I couldn’t stay focused on the names of the House and Senate members (535) or the names of the chemicals (infinite).

I got fired. I was in my mid-twenties, with nothing, and went home to live with my parents. I felt like a loser. One night my dad asked me to watch The Sopranos. I said no because I wasn’t familiar with the show. This was the early 90s and The Sopranos was one of the top hits. 

He said, “What do you do with your time?”

Maybe my dad just wanted to know, but I took the question as an accusation.

I said, “Um…I talk to my friends on the phone.”

In high school, with the kitchen phone cord stretched as far as it could, I talked to my friend as she cried through her parents’ divorce. Years later, standing at the payphones in our college dorms, she worried she was unlovable because she didn’t have a boyfriend. In our thirties, in separate cities on our flip phones, I talked her through bad boyfriend after bad boyfriend until she met her husband.

Back then she said, “You missed your calling. You should have been a shrink.”

For the last 25 years, I’ve been writing memoir and personal essays, which requires looking inward. Now, my wife, Vicky, says I spend my days in therapy with myself. She’s right, but I don’t think this is a compliment.

When we dropped Tashi at UNC Asheville, Vicky asked if I wanted to go back to college.

“No way!”

The thought of having to learn statistics, or even something “interesting,” like Ethics in Media, which was one of our daughter’s actual classes, brought up that recurring nightmare where I have a test and I can’t find my classroom.

Vicky, on the other hand, studied the course guide, oohing and aahing. Vicky collects novels, biographies, cookbooks, poetry, Latin literature…you get the picture. She’s fluent in Spanish and English, so she took up Italian. She takes cooking classes and is always enrolled in continuing education in her field—finance. Once, she took a class on how to create a vertical garden. Now we have plants all up the walls.

Vicky is interested in everything. It’s exhausting.

A few years ago, we heard Elizabeth Gilbert author of Eat, Pray, Love, tell a crowd at the Miami Book Fair to follow our curiosities. Vicky started following her curiosities before we even got to the car. She walked and Googled the parts of the foot. Her plantar fasciitis was acting up and now she wanted to know which bones connected to which muscles.

“Twenty-six bones in each foot,” she said.

“Sounds like a lot,” I said.

She said, “Phalanges, metatarsals, tarsals.”

While she drove, she gave me a full anatomy lesson as I thought about how fascinating Vicky is to have so many fascinations. She explaining the interrelatedness of all the muscles in the body, all the way up to the brain. “Technically,” Vicky said, “the brain isn’t a muscle, but it still needs to be exercised.”

The part about the brain needing exercise hurt my feelings.

Last week, while Vicky and our son went to the Everglades to learn about local foliage, I went to Key Largo to lead a writing retreat. For six days, students wrote and read their stories and I asked questions. One student wrote about handing over her car keys because of Parkinson’s. How do you feel about your husband when he drives you? Another wrote about a childhood obsession with weapons and his current distain for the Second Amendment. How do you reconcile those two parts of yourself? Another student wrote about being sexually abused in her early twenties. How did that impact how you love now?

At the end of the week, a student asked what I’d do if I couldn’t write or teach writing.

I said, “Nothing. I have no interests.”

She looked at me dead on. “Are you crazy? You’re interested in us.”

And there at the dinner table, I saw myself sitting inside Lucy’s psychiatrist booth.

I’ve always been interested in my friends’ problems, now I’m interested in people’s stories. The terms have changed, but my interest is the same—people. Maybe talking on the phone all these years wasn’t a complete waste of time. It might have been an unusual road, but talking to my friends on the phone led to my calling.

I’m confident my daughter will find her calling too. I just hope it doesn’t take her 55 years to realize there’s nothing wrong with her.
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Andrea Askowitz is the author of the memoir My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy. She’s written for The New York Times, Salon, Washington Post, Huffington Post, The Writer, and Glamour. She’s the co-host and producer of the podcast Writing Class Radio. Find her on social media @andreaaskowitz.