It's Time to DIG

A dolphin, a Peloton instructor, and a little Botany lesson

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a marine biologist.

A Pisces by birthdate and fundamental being, I am my best self around any body of water. More calm, less critical. More light, less lock down. Even as a young person, this was not a difficult realization for me. Science - the study of the natural world and its creatures - fascinated me, yes, but zoo shmoo. Give me a day with dolphins.

My mother, ever my biggest fan, was highly supportive of this interest and signed me up for a summer camp after seventh grade that she couldn’t afford at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. For a week, I waded through the marsh waters of the North Carolina coast hunting down actively copulating crabs to study their mating patterns.

Did you know that in order for crabs to reproduce, the male must do this bull fighter-esque dance with claw castanets to catch the female’s attention? If she is receptive, the male “cages” her beneath him. They can stay locked like this up to a week until her shell softens from the hormones he produces, and then he flips her over so they can mate. The process of transferring his sperm in to her receptacles can take up to twelve hours! 😳 When he’s done, he is gentlemanly enough to flip her back over, sitting atop her for up to two days to protect her from predators while her shell hardens again, but then he exits stage left to clack off again at another lady down the way.

Photo courtesy of NOAA, which feels like all the irony.

Biology is the great equalizer, ya’ll. Fucking is just fucking - crabs, humans, its all the same. There’s a little game, some hormonally-driven subterfuge, a longer than necessary main event, and a small show of chivalry so nobody feels bad about themselves.

But, I digress.

Our job in this summer camp was to un-cage the crabs so our instructors could take some swabs of God-knows-what to study. You got that right, my job was to pull apart two nekkid blue crabs locked in their marshy bedroom under the covers with Barry White on the radio. Let’s just say they were less than amused, but I was hooked! Not clawed, mind you, which is somewhat miraculous.

Later that same summer, my mom and I were walking on the beach at dusk when we came across a group of people huddled around something in the water. It was high tide, so they weren’t out far, but in waist deep water getting pummeled by the incoming waves. Without thinking twice, I barreled in to the water to join them. The group was trying to save a dolphin who had beached herself. They were holding her afloat in the ocean while waiting on the aquarium staff to rescue her. I shouldered my way in, laying my hands under the dolphin’s back body, planting my feet as best I could to hold steady against the waves.

Every part of my preteen existence worked to hold this dolphin up in the water. After mere minutes, my muscles were screaming, and I could feel my legs shaking. My mind snapped images, shutter on auto, capturing and processing as much as I could while my body strained to hold on. Finally, the crew arrived and positioned their truck to back a sling as close to the water’s edge as possible. The rag tag group of beach goers turned dolphin lifeguards worked together to get the travel sling under the dolphin and then fight our way out of the water and up to the point where we could slide her on to the truck’s apparatus.

Exhausted, I fell to my knees in the sand, tears streaming down my face. My mom thought I was hurt or maybe distraught over the dolphin’s fate, but I was so. incredibly. happy.

Joy. Pure joy.

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At some point not too long thereafter, I was sitting on the banks of Smith Mountain Lake with my grandfather. My grandparents owned a townhome on this manmade lake for several years while I was growing up. It was another water wonderland for me.

My grandfather, with a gravity only he could pull off, turned to me and said, “Now Jessica, what do you think you want to be when you grow up?”

Undeterred by his tone or the intent behind such a serious question on a Saturday afternoon, I answered without hesitation. “A marine biologist.”

“No,” he said.

“No?” I questioned, confused.

“No,” he repeated. “You’ll never make any money as a marine biologist.”

That was the end of the conversation, less because he shut down further commentary and more because I was so shocked that words failed me. I sat, silently, trying to process what to do with that assertion, said so confidently and with such finality that it left no room in the air between us for argument.

It is unfair to blame my grandfather for my not becoming a marine biologist. At the time, I had zero knowledge of how marine biologists earned a living, no concept of the stress of grant-funded positions, no idea how competitive it actually is to get a job at Sea World. I have never been motivated by money, so it was less the fear that what he said was true, and more that he shared none of my excitement for this dream. A child of the Depression and a professional baseball player during a time when that came with a pittance not a penthouse, he was acutely aware of the import of choosing a profession with earning potential. I see now that there was a compliment buried in this conversation. Coming from a man with three sons, the fact that my grandfather determined that I, a girl, was smart and scrappy enough to have a professional future that warranted worrying about something like earning potential was saying something.

So, while unfair, and perhaps unfounded, this conversation did begin the unraveling of my young dream. When the next summer rolled around, I called off crab camp. And while I never lost the love of science, I let go of musing about the marine part.

My entire non-marine biology career looks like the natural history of a snake, lots of fairly predictable moltings designed to shed a previous skin before moving on to a new destination. My CV reads either like a bad case of job ADD or a recruiter’s dream as my eclectic skill set fulfills at least two-thirds of most job descriptions. It’s not an impossible story to explain when I’m given the opportunity to offer the narrative version. I’ve woven a pretty convincing Aesop fable out of the twists and turns, with several moral reckonings in there for theatric effect.

Except, I don’t believe my own tale.

Without the theatrics, the truth is, I get bored. Easily. I like problems, and once I solve them, I’m over it.

This a stable career does not make.

I struggle with how to present myself to the world. I feel like my LinkedIn banner should just read, “I Do That,” because sans something to do with math, coding, or policy, I do. The catchall feels like a copout, though, because I actually don’t say yes to much anymore. I’ve learned that unless I’m broke, my “Yes” needs to be a “Hell YES!” , and I only take on projects that are problems I’m excited to solve, involve people I want to work with, or make it possible for me to elevate stories I think are important.

But what the hell do you call that? What job title, self descriptor, list of adjectives, or even company name do you give someone who does that?

I don’t know.

And it’s bothering me.

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The Universe usually presents herself to me in unusual ways and places. Likely because I overthink the obvious ones. If she slides in there under my hypervigilant radar, she can evade my typical tirade of why that’s not it, won’t work, and is a waste of time.

So, I was on my Peloton, headphones in, tuned in to one of my favorite instructors, Christine D’Ercole. Sometimes her hot and cold club crap annoys me, and she can be snarky about keeping your hands on the bars and closing your eyes, but I just snap right back at the screen and do my own thing. What I dig about her is her woo. It’s just the right amount for me, which is to say, it comes with a healthy dose of “get your shit together.”

She started talking about how she originally came to NYC to be a Broadway actress. And she’s had a hard time integrating what actually happened with that initial goal. She said to come to terms with it, she had to revisit the taproot. Now, I have a degree in Biology, yes, and I got a perfect score on my Botany final in twenty-three minutes because my parking meter was going to run out, but to say I retained the vernacular of said specialty is asking a lot. I got off the bike and looked up the word. The taproot, apparently, is the straight root that grows vertically downward and serves as the anchor off which all of the other subroots grow.

The taproot…

Her taproot, she said, is to tell stories about things that matter. All of the other subroots of her life have derived from that primary motivation.

“If you’ve lost connection with your taproot,” she intoned and then took a breath, made eye contact, and exhaled…”then DIG!”

Fully alert now, I gave the Universe an eye roll for pulling another one over on me and said out loud, “I hear you, Christine.”

With this new terminology, its become easier for me to explain where my efforts to categorize and market myself are failing. I’ve been trying to name my subroots, probably because they’re much closer to the surface, instead of figuring out how to describe the taproot, the singular motivation that gives life to all of the others. The anchoring thing that makes me me.

Christine’s right. I need to dig.

I don’t know why rescuing a dolphin brought me so much joy. I don’t know why I get bored so easily, why problems feel more fulfilling than solutions, why my mind dances from market access to memoir manifesto, finding just as much joy in both.

I don’t know why, but I suspect its because of my taproot.

But I haven’t dug deep enough yet to name that. My guess is because the truth of that will scare me. It will likely not be the thing others with expectations want to hear from me. It undoubtedly will not be connected to earning money. And I’ll struggle to say it out loud to people I respect for fear that what they hear will not match the regard in which I hope they hold me.

When I quit my full-time job last year, I metaphorically went out and bought a hand trowel. I’ve subsequently been removing little piles of dirt from the bottom of my tree ever since, slowly, painstakingly, carefully digging around the trunk to peer at what’s underneath.

I think it’s time to buy a shovel.

There’s a root down there, one that is the source of my professional joy, and if I understood it better, was in a position to nurture it, even, I think I might have better luck aligning my professional pursuits with a singular purpose. One that doesn’t sound like a fable, but a fact.

Something like, “I am Jess Greenwood, and I do _________________.”

Until I can fill in the blank, I plan to keep digging. There’s a dolphin down there somewhere. I just know it.

I don’t actually expect you to buy me a dolphin, but you can support my writing about dolphins and my wayward marine biology career by financially supporting my work with this button. Any amount is much appreciated. 🙏