"I have worked all my life, wanted to work all my life, needed to work all my life"

A life stitched to work can sound either like a lament or a creed. Here, it is both: an affirmation of identity and a frank reckoning with circumstance. The first clause, “I have worked all my life”, asserts continuity, a spine of effort running through years of change. It is not a momentary sprint but an unbroken discipline, the habit of showing up, producing, organizing, and engaging the world through action.

“Wanted to work” adds motive and joy. Desire punctures the stereotype that labor is merely drudgery or compulsion. It hints at vocation, at the pleasure of competence and the spark that comes from using one’s mind and voice in public. For a woman of Liz Carpenter’s generation, this declaration is especially pointed: ambition was often treated as unfeminine, yet wanting to work says, without apology, that fulfillment is found beyond the confines of expectation. Work becomes a stage for agency, wit, and influence.

“Needed to work” introduces the harder edge, economic reality, yes, but also a psychic and civic necessity. Work can be the structure that keeps a life from unraveling, the ritual that steadies grief, the arena where curiosity finds tasks, the channel for service. It is also the means to independence: one’s own earnings, one’s own authority. Need acknowledges barriers and obligations, family, bills, history, while refusing to surrender to them. It is a confession of constraint and a strategy for freedom at once.

The triad together collapses the false divide between passion and duty. Choice and necessity, pleasure and pressure, are not mutually exclusive; they braid into a resilient purpose. There is pride here, and realism, and an ethic of usefulness that resists both idleness and self-erasure. To work all one’s life, to want it, to need it, is to claim a life anchored in contribution, marked by persistence, animated by desire, and legitimized by the realities it confronts and transforms.