I always wanted to be a writer. I always chose to be practical. Turns out, practicality is boring.
As a small child, I once drew a picture of myself as a doctor to illustrate what I wanted to be when I grew up. I don’t think I ever actually wanted to be a doctor, but I know I drew the picture. Later, I decided I would be a veterinarian. This was probably the first time I acknowledged that I like animals more than I like people.
By seventh grade, I knew that neither of those professions were right for me. I would be a writer. Of course, I had to be practical about it, so I would be a journalist. I hit another snag in those plans when I started writing articles. The teacher who ran the high school journalism classes and the school newspaper made it clear that we had to interview people other than our friends. I did not find interviewing people other than my friends particularly fun. My plans to become a journalist were doomed.
I was always meant to be a fiction writer. My parents acquired their first computer when I was nine years old. It sat on the finished side of our basement, connected to a dot matrix printer. It was 1995, and the first thing I did with that computer was start a story about Spanish-speaking aliens. (To be clear, it was about aliens from outer-space who spoke Spanish, not human immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries.) The internet was only a few years old and had not spread into every American household yet, so my research came only from a tiny English-Spanish dictionary. The story was never finished, and I never learned to speak Spanish.
More stories were started and never finished in middle school. I wrote a lot of poetry, as one does at thirteen. Some things I wrote were good. Some were terrible. Some still exist as little time-capsules that have traveled from computer to computer over the years. It’s fascinating to open a 20-year-old file to see what I was writing in 1999.
Unfortunately, I decided to be “practical” as I grew up. I would be a counselor. No, I would be a teacher and then get my master’s in guidance counseling. Never mind, teaching jobs were few and far between when I graduated college in 2011. No matter, I could find an office job. You know what would make working in an office better? Accounting. I like math and numbers. I should be an accountant. I’d get that master’s degree and become a CPA.
So here we are. Don’t get me wrong, traveling with an external audit team as a CPA really does sound like fun to me. I still intend to finish the CPA exam and do just that. But those unfinished stories are haunting me. New stories are ready to be written.
I’m 33 years old, and I know what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be a fiction writer.