The Rise of the Slashie

The multihyphenate career is becoming  increasingly common in a changing economy. Lisa Pryor shares the highs and lows of her neverending résumé.

It is late on a Friday and I am searching for a vein. The pads of my fingers rove the arm of an elderly lady in a hospital gown, feeling for a good place to insert a drip. When I find the spot, I rub it with antiseptic, snap on sterile gloves and get ready with the needle. This isn’t how I used to spend my Friday nights. The word ‘career’ has two meanings. The first, the noun, refers to the series of jobs a person has in a lifetime. The second, the verb, means to hurtle forward in an uncontrolled way. Those two meanings come together in my working life, as one of the ever-increasing number of people with multiple, interwoven careers. More specifically, I am a law graduate who spent a decade working as a newspaper journalist, then published two books and now works as a junior doctor in a busy hospital.

This is how it unfolded for me. I ended up studying law at university because I “got the marks”, a factor common among law students, even though my favourite subject at school was art. While law school was enjoyable enough, and paying my way through with casual jobs in law firms was more lucrative than retail, I never wanted to become a lawyer, trapped in the world of contracts and annexures and client dinners.

So having ruled out a legal career, I thought I’d try my hand at journalism by taking a job at The Sydney Morning Herald. I loved it as soon as I started. At the time it felt like there was no better job, being paid to have the most miraculous experiences while so many people I knew were stuck at desks — flying to Africa for a travel story, investigating important issues and waking to hear people discussing your story on the radio, or even the languid pleasure of getting paid to watch television and write about it.