Two and a half years ago, I didn't have a clue about the magazine industry or publishing or what it took to write professionally.
Heck, even four and a half years ago, after having earned my bachelor's in professional writing, I didn't even have a grasp on what was involved.
And yet, here I am today, on the other side of a two-year-plus stint at a national magazine, now writing from home full-time. I'm running my own professional website, I have a for-business-only e-mail address, I have business cards, I've made an appointment with a photographer for a portrait to put on my cards and other various locations on the internet, and best of all, I have jobs and contacts.
The whole ordeal seems a bit insane to me to some degree, I'll admit. When I chose my major in college, I got the expected raised eyebrows from many (many) people, including my parents (especially my parents). "You want to major in professional writing? What does that mean?"
And I would explain in a usually -- not always, but usually -- patient manner that it meant I would most likely go on to work at a PR company, writing press releases, or I would be writing ad copy for a corporation or a marketing firm. And usually -- not always, but usually -- that would kind of put an end to people's questions.
To be honest, though, I'm not sure that I believed what I was saying each time I gave that explanation. It's not that I believed I'd be writing poetry chapbooks or penning novels, it's just that I really wasn't sure what a professional writing degree meant, either. All I knew was that writing for other people was something I was good at and something I enjoyed doing, and fortunately, I was able to convince my family and friends of the same.
Of course, now it's easy for me to see a third fold to that logic, which is the fact that my ability to write is, maybe luckily or unluckily, my only marketable skill. Really. And I'm not disappointed in that.
It makes a lot of sense now that I'm older. I am a kind of copier, in a sense; I can only work with things that have already been created or provided to me, but I can't just create stuff in the true sense of the word. And when I was a kid, this used to frustrate me to no end. But now that I'm an adult, I can finally see the pattern, and it's allowed me to play to my strengths, and also explained a lot about who I am and what I'm capable of.
See, there was a reason that I could only make beautiful copies from photos when I was in art class in high school. And there was a reason I couldn't just make up choreography on my own in tap class. And there was a reason I sucked at sports, too -- if a scenario didn't exactly fit one of our pre-game drills, I couldn't recognize what my reaction should be. And I was never really any good at geometry or calculus or science, either, because those subjects, too, take a special kind of creativity that I just don't have. (I did rock algebra pretty hard, though. I can find X with the best of them. Boo-yah.) And to this day, after knitting for years, I can't make up or adjust knitting patterns on the fly; if something doesn't have absolutely every single stitch written out, I can just forget it.
So maybe I can't do any of those other things very well, but what I can do is take a whoooooole lot of information and words, process it, and then spit it back out, so to speak -- re-organize it in a way that's interesting and that people can understand.
Even though everything about the way my brain is wired funneled me down the path of writing and editing, I never knew that it could lead to something as cool as this -- a career in which I get to work from home but still go to events, get to make my own schedule and decide when I take time off, and yet still earn a living while meeting new people and learning new things every day.
I've come a long way, baby. I'm proud of myself. I was a frustrated little kid (and later, a frustrated adult), who didn't understand why I couldn't just be good at all the things I wanted to be good at. But now I have a much broader view.
My point is ...
Maybe there's something you wish you were better at or had a knack for that you just always struggle with, and maybe it's time to recognize that that's OK. Maybe it's time to discover what the positive is to your negative, so to speak.
We're all bad at things, and we're all good at things. And sometimes looking at one can help us determine the other.
And I think that's pretty cool.
