I've always been intrigued by different career options, but I've never had a clear direction. As a young child, I want to be a clown (to make people laugh) and a firefighter (to help people). As a teen, I was all over the map with my interests. I wanted to be a pilot. Who didn't when you watched Danger Bay every day? I wanted to be an interior decorator - until I found out you needed strong math skills. Archeology would be fun too, but how do you train for that? I wanted to make crafts and sell them, but there was no way to make enough of a living doing that. I thought about cleaning houses, but that was shot down for financial reasons as well. Oh, and I wanted to be a florist too.
Throughout my 20s and 30s, I tried my hand at various things. While it was helpful to rule out what I didn't want to pursue, the dots still weren't coming together for me.
Fast forward to my 40s where I've gotten closer to figuring out what to pursue. I've looked into a number of things including studying history, becoming a library technician, and even training to be an editor. However, none of these were still quite right.
You've heard the saying, "Can't see the forest for the trees"? When you are too close to a situation, you need to step back and get a little perspective. If you look at things one at a time, you might not realize that branches of separate "trees" go together to make a "forest."
Well, in hindsight, I see that's exactly what I had been doing. Here are my "trees":
- Words
- Proofreading
- Grammar
- Spelling
- Punctuation
- Editing
- Fact-checking
- Paraphrasing
- Reading
- Word puzzles/games
- Blogging
- Research
- Transcription
- My job at Hansard
- And probably much more!
Enter God. All it took was a few words: "I created you to be a writer."
I was shocked and amazed, happy and relieved! After 25 years of being an adult, I finally knew what it was God had created me to be! Writing was my forest, and I honestly could not see it for all those trees - the bits and pieces I enjoyed.
Talk about hope! I have so many options now! I can write about whatever and whoever I want wherever and whenever. This brings so much freedom! Wow.
