The Novice Year

Rowing has a term for a person in their first year of competition – a novice. I was 14 in my novice year, exhilarated and subsumed, like anyone newly in love. Everything about rowing interested me, from the intricacies of the stroke to the way we put the riggers on the boat. I was a girl obsessed, hell bent on becoming the best at this beautiful and punishing sport.

Almost forty years later I am a novice again. Not in rowing, but in a new career teaching dyslexic kids to read. I’ve certainly been new at things again and again during those years – marriage, motherhood, management, you name it – but this is the first time I have sought out a path where I knew I would know nothing and where I would start as a raw beginner. I didn’t choose my path despite the need to be a novice, I chose this path because I wanted to be a novice. Craved it, even.

The beauty of becoming a novice is the beauty of a clean slate, of open and endless possibilities. You don’t know enough to be jaded, cynical, or limited, states of mind that in and of themselves shut down creativity and growth. I want to be unencumbered by all I think I already know.

It is scary, of course. Also absurd, sometimes, like when I tell people I’m an intern and they look at me sideways. I have moments of panic when I think about having a period of zero income at the same time I send a kid off to college. What kind of mad woman does what I just did?

As global health is eviscerated by the Trump administration many of us will need to become novices again as we retrain. I was a half step ahead due to a fulminant case of burnout, and so I am lucky to have an idea of a path. What I am learning as I jettison twenty five years of public health expertise is that…it doesn’t actually go away. I can’t stop myself from thinking like a public health nerd. As I walked the dog this morning I was wondering whether diffusion of innovation was the right theory to use to explain why evidence-based reading instruction isn’t being used in most schools, counties, and states. And then I got interested in what model dyslexia advocates are using, and whether our SMART advocacy tools might have anything to add.

So yes, I am a novice. But I’m a novice who knows some stuff. A novice who will revel in utter beginner-hood, soak it all up, and then when I am ready I’m going to bring everything I’ve learned over a long career and apply it, and see what I might contribute.

This morning maybe you are sitting in the wreckage of your global health career. You are in good company – the best, really. The very best. Go have a drink and cry with friends and colleagues. And when you think “what next,” don’t be too afraid of the novice year. Go put your oar in the water and see what comes next. I’ll be right there with you.