Midlife career change?

This has been a busy week with the music festival and with no day off to sit and puddle about. On my day off I attended a science editing workshop ostensibly to improve my editing skills for our Surgery newsletter and handouts but also to try on a new career. My fellow students were from the CSIRO and various government departments focussed on communicating with the public and other lay people on scientific topics. The younger ones had degrees in media and communications, the older ones had slipped into the editing role sideways, finding that their role as gatekeeper of sensitive information meant wordsmithing and editing.
Our trainer from Biotext, Hilary Cadman, kept our attention for the full day with short grabs of information then exercises in groups or alone. She refreshed my knowledge of the basics of editing and I picked up on the continuing controversies in the editing world that I didn’t cotton onto when doing editing by distance education. There is nothing like personal interaction for understanding the nuances and subtleties of a subject.
So would I leave vetting to become an editor, even a veterinary editor? It would mean the loss of my veterinary identity, the kind, caring, animal-lover me and the authoritative, credible me. I would be starting out again as a junior, learning the jargon, habits and attitudes of a new professional, a new persona. I am past worrying about the adequacy of my qualifications and experience and I know what is permissible, what is possible as a veterinarian in this place and time. If I made a fresh start all those insecurities would dog me as I made new contacts and built up relationships around my new work.
Changing careers is more than a change of job it is an overhaul of self and identity. When I left my job as a government vet to marry Chris and live on a farm the mat was pulled from under me. I had spent five years training and five years learning the ropes of vetting in private practice and then in the Department of Agriculture and suddenly I was “just” a farmer’s wife. I did not know who I was if I was not a vet. Although I had looked forward to time to write and reflect I devised endless household and farm chores to fill time and myself as I tried to find myself in the new situation. No one in the town knew of my past life or was even interested in it. Women there gained brownie points for being good wives and mothers -working mothers were the source of society’s evils. I learnt to keep quiet about my profession especially after my first baby. I was tangled in a morass of conflicting identities and expectations until I took some locum positions and started to regain my foothold on myself.
It is not only experience that forms the self it is the whole glove of identity that a person pulls on when they call themselves, or are called, a certain type of professional. As soon as I call myself a vet, I am expected to know a certain set of skills and knowledge and to operate within my field with judgement, authority and a high degree of ethical behaviour. If I changed my career I would change my reputation as well as the expectations others have of me.
So although a change is tempting, I will probably stick to vetting with small excursions into writing and editing scientific material. A working day spent sitting in front of a flickering screen would probably send me bananas in a week, anyway.