Love at the Speed of Email Read Online Free Page B

reasonably.
    “I just feel like I really should be overseas,” I said, stopping just short of claiming divine
directive on the topic, “and I don’t want to work in prison again.”
    I knew Mum wouldn’t argue with that second point. My parents
hadn’t been thrilled when I announced my decision to specialize in forensics.
Neither were they charmed upon learning that my first internship would have me
spending six months in the maximum-security unit of Australia’s largest prison
for men, and I doubt that my subsequent anecdotes about making knives out of
toothbrushes and smuggling drugs in tennis balls did all that much to reassure
them. They were much happier when I left the prison and moved on to my next
rotation, with the state police. Or, at least, they were happy until they found
out the types of cases we were regularly called in for: child abuse, sexual
assault, shootings, and particularly nasty homicides.
    “So can I come stay with you in the
Philippines for a while?” I asked.
    Mum sighed over the long-distance line.
    “I knew you should have done organizational psychology,” she
said.
    “Mum,” I said.
“Organizational psychology is boring.”
    “It’s not boring,”
she said in a familiar refrain. “It’s what I would have done if I’d studied
psychology.”
    “And you would have been very good at it,” I said, “seeing
as how you’re naturally equipped for the post of benevolent dictator of a small
country. But I am not you, and I think it’s boring.”
    “You think everything not extreme, dark, or dangerous is
boring,” my mother replied calmly. “I don’t understand where you got that from. Certainly not from your
father or me.”
    “I could just get
a job in Australia,” I said, playing my trump card. “Probably the only ones
left in my field now are back in maximum security or in the sex offenders unit.
Or maybe I can stay with the police.”
    “Okay, stop it,” Mum said. “You can come and stay with us for
a while. But what are you planning on actually doing ?”
    Much as she clearly loves us, no one has ever accused my
mother of suffering from empty-nest syndrome. On the contrary, I think she
threw a party the day all three of us were finally out of the house.
    “I’m going to write a novel,” I said. “And volunteer with
nonprofits and look for a job with a humanitarian organization.”
    In response to this, I now realize, my parents would have
been perfectly within their rights to say, “Um, hello? We just put you through
six years of higher education so you could leave your developed-world haven? Instead of getting a paying job, you want to move
back in with us, volunteer in the slums, search out
ways to relocate to Africa, and write a novel? Write a novel? What are you thinking? You don’t know anything about writing novels!”
    But they didn’t say that.
    They said okay.
    And I packed my bags for Manila.  

 
 
    Zagreb,
Croatia

 
 
    I spent five months in the Philippines trying to write my
novel and working as a volunteer before I got my first job offer. The offer was
for a professional internship in the Balkans, but not as a human rights
advocate or an election monitor or any one of a dozen other roles I had thought
I might fall into. Instead, the development organization that was interested in
my resume seemed to actually want the
psychology training I was so willing to leave behind, and I ended up in Croatia
providing trauma-counseling and stress-management training to its staff.
    After six months of this, I knew two things: that my heart
really was in humanitarian work and
that I could do with some more training if I wanted to work as anything but a
trauma specialist.
    Don’t get me wrong – I think trauma psychologists do amazing
and necessary work. I just didn’t think I was a particularly good one. I’d picked forensics in the
first place largely because it sounded mysterious and sexy. But it stops being
a game very quickly when you’re trying