Meet My Client: Deborah Wassertzug

Deborah is the mother of two, a freelance translator, a former academic librarian, and (maybe still) a poet. She also authors a blog about living with cancer. She and I worked together for three months.

Tell everyone who you are and what you’re up to.

My name is Deborah and I’m a freelance translator. When I was working with you, I was in the process of letting go of my former career as an academic librarian, which I had stopped doing in order to raise two kids. Then illness got in the way. When I was ready to return to work, there was a very different landscape in terms of getting a job in my field again. I had skills to fall back on as a translator and it had always been in the back of my mind to try to make a go of it as a career, but I felt like it was not legitimate to say, hey! I’m going to try to do my own thing.

What drove you to hire a coach?

I had been working with a therapist for eight or nine months to cope with the changed reality that learning how to live with cancer brought, because living with cancer is something that I do. I’m stage four with no active disease and I am going to stay that way until, I like to joke, stage five. Finishing that process of working with the therapist, I felt like okay, I have a good handle on how you live with a big sword over your head, so now what is left of my identity as a professional person? I’m active in an online community, and one of the members had worked with you and I was keen to hear more and that’s how it started.

What was a big thing that came from our coaching?

I definitely was hearing some of the same things about myself in our sessions that I had heard in therapy — namely, and I think it’s a problem a lot of people have — needing to dial back the self criticism, needing to ask, where does that come from? and why is that happening? and how can I make that stop? Because that really gets in the way of making actual progress. So, I had heard that from another source and then I heard that from you … It’s sort of like when I was growing up — I saw the same dentist my whole life until I was 23 and I moved out to a different state and had to find my own dentist — and my whole life, this dentist I had seen for years told me I should really floss, and I was like, yeah, whatever. Because when you’re 17 and the same person has been taking care of your teeth forever, you’re not going to do anything they say. When I chose my own dentist and he said you really need to floss, I was like -- OK! And I flossed. So it was sort of like that with the self loathing and criticism — it was like, two very distinct kind of professionals have identified this in you and it is an impediment to progress, so let’s stop!

How’d you stop?

I wouldn’t say it’s 100%, but I feel like you have to just operate on the assumption that you’re not a fraud. And that there’s something genuinely of value you’re trying to do in the world and measuring yourself by other people’s yardsticks is never a great idea, especially if you’re starting out in a new career. You are constantly needing to remind yourself of that.

We completed our coaching about two and a half years ago, what do you still think about or come back to today?

I’m not typically a person who responds to structure … a lot of who I am comes from a place that is unstructured and a little chaotic. It was reassuring to work with you because you made me feel like it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s possible to have an intentional approach to how you do things and that it doesn’t have to look a certain way, I get to make it up. Other than trying to manage the crappy self talk, I think that was helpful.

A couple of months after we worked together I had a birthday — and I was feeling like I wanted to come up with a plan for what I want to do. I had just turned 45 and I happen to look around — there were two people in my life who were doing amazing things at age 52 — and so I came up with a seven year plan. And I sat down and decided that every month I was going check in with myself about this plan. But it’s not super structured. There are certain things I’d like to do by the time I’m 52, and it’s looking pretty certain that I will get to 52, so that is my aspirational age.

I’ve been doing this for two full years now — and it’s interesting because the first year I felt I had to write up this narrative of what I had done each month, and the end of the year came and I had a little retreat with myself to look at what I’d done over the year. Yes, I’d done a lot but everything I had written bored me. I was having a visceral negative reaction to having to read these monthly updates. So I stopped doing that.

Another thing that was helpful — I started out with a long list of things I wanted to accomplish and then I decided that part of the process was that I got to cross off anything on the list I wanted, whether I accomplished the thing or not. Then I went to the top of a mountain on my birthday at the end of year two and decided what I would be doing for the third year. It’s been a fun and freeing and flexible process that keeps me aware that I don’t need to get stuck in one way of doing things. There’s this continual need to talk up what I have done and not run myself down for things that I haven’t done. I don’t know that any of that would have occurred to me if we hadn’t worked together.

Also, coaching gave me the permission to put my former career to rest. And to say, I was an academic librarian and I did that and I acknowledge the skills it gave me, which I can absolutely transfer, but I don’t need to keep trying. The number one thing I was looking for was that realization. I felt like I needed some external process to validate that feeling.

What surprised you about coaching?

I guess I was surprised that it was a little bit like therapy, but also not. It was like therapy in the ways you’d expect, yeah, you need to continue focusing on yourself and the patterns you might be getting stuck in. But it was not like therapy in that it was immediately practical. There were things I could do week to week.

What lives on from our coaching?

The seven year plan is a way that the legacy of working together lives on. I’m not thinking about it everyday, but it’s nice to have a plan, even if it’s not the kind of plan people who know how to plan would recognize. It’s a radical notion to me that I can have one and actually see progress, there’s always going to be some positive affirmation in my life. It’s sort of ideal, to be able to pause once a month and say, hey, you didn’t realize it, but you just did this and this.

What I like about this seven year plan is yes, it’s a plan, but it also feels really loose and flexible.

Yeah, very random, it’s not like most people think of age 52 and are like YEAH! You know when you’ve had a terminal illness that could come back at any time, you’re like, yes, it would be good to turn 52, it means I survived. So, what can I be doing while I’m waiting to turn 52?

When I was sick, it was about putting one foot in front of the other, and let’s get over the side effects of treatment and try and put weight back on, or all the different things you have to cope with, you have to go from one scan to the next. It’s been really interesting to incorporate the idea of a plan into my life.

Another thing I wanted to mention — having gotten to know you as an individual has been really inspiring, because I have followed your journey and your identifying the goals that you have and especially with your creative work. That was a bonus for me.

That is nice of you to say! I think what I’ve enjoyed about watching you — through your posts on Facebook — is that we finished our coaching and then you were just off and running. You wanted a translation business and from what I can tell, that’s been going well — that’s what you’re doing now.

Yeah, I mean it's still far from full-time work — but what I’m doing now, I found a web designer to set up a site for my business. I have a solid idea of how I want to approach looking for more work.

When we were coaching, I think you were just starting to think about how to begin.

There were sort of artificial obstacles I was putting in my path back then. It’s interesting, having now moved out of New York City, that while living there, I really had these mental shackles — you don’t have enough credentials, and now I’m like, I’ve gotten all this work without having all these certifications so maybe that’s not the way to get work. Maybe the way to get work is to figure out where the work is.

What do you think the value of coaching is?

For me personally, it was the necessary next step. It was, first see to the mental health piece of dealing with terminal illness. I did that. I worked with someone who specialized in that. Then I needed something — I needed to work with a coach in order to make concrete what my assumption was, which was that I really needed to try doing something else and stop beating myself up for not finding a job in my former field. And coaching really did that. And more. Even though we didn’t work together that long — I was ready to hear the things that I heard.

It strikes me when we first working together, the world outside of your bed was not holding a lot of allure and now you’re out in the world!

Yeah, that was part of it — I had a really hard time getting out of bed and it had become a place of refuge during my illness, and I was hiding there, for sure. It’s still somewhere I tend to gravitate towards. But I was actually lying in bed when you were going to call me for this interview, and I was like, I can’t!

What are you excited about for the rest of your seven year plan?

Well, I was just in Italy. I took a week long translation seminar and it was really intense and hard but also great and it really re-inspired me to try to pursue literary translation. Which is, of course, the least lucrative, it’s something you do to for the love of it. But I was super excited by that. I met twelve new great colleagues who do what I do. And in a really solitary profession, that is gold. So I’m excited, it has really reignited my engagement with that aspect of the field. I’m excited to launch my website and my new business incarnation, which is called Spitfire Translations. And I’m excited to get more work.

This year’s portion of the seven year plan is to decide if I am still a poet. Because I wrote poetry for many years and stopped, so I am excited to figure that out. Or maybe not! There’s a lot of things that are exciting.

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Check out Deborah’s blog, I’ll Live, where she has written about living with cancer. And if you’re interested in her translation services, hit her up on LinkedIn (while her new website is being built).

This originally appeared in my January 2019 email newsletter. To get on the list and receive this and other goodies in your inbox, sign up at pamdaghlian.com/newsletter

pamela daghlianMarch 7, 2019newsletter, interview, meet my client