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"The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written." -- Joyce Carol Oates
I never really pictured myself as a writer when I was younger.
Most kids wanted to be teachers or firefighters or athletes or business owners. I'm not exactly sure how I pictured myself, but the idea of writing never struck.
Thinking back on it, I have no idea why.
I was the little girl with the voice password diaries and notebooks hidden everywhere. I still have way too many journals, each serving its own purpose.
But the possibility of a writing career never felt like an option.
Maybe it's because the arts have always been a difficult field -- one that I think goes underappreciated, for one, but also just isn't encouraged enough.
In grade school, taking art classes never felt like a real school subject. At least not the way that math, history, science, and language arts did. Everyone always made it feel secondary, like it was and could only ever be a hobby.
And writing was kept primarily professional, with strict rubrics and subjects to follow, with the pressure of getting a good grade always lurking in the background. It felt more like a chore than something to be appreciated.
And, yet, somehow, I ended up on my current path. A path I love with everything that I am.
I guess it primarily started for me in my junior year of high school, when I decided to take yearbook because I love photography. It was another outside-of-school hobby I wanted to be able to explore in a classroom setting, and yearbook was one of my only options.
But, of course, I wasn't strictly a photographer in the class. I started doing interviews and began practicing journalism for the first time in my life. Yearbook quickly became my favorite class.
At that point, though, I still didn't imagine that path for myself.
Although I loved working on the yearbook, I always told myself that, no matter how much I loved it, I'd never get the feeling back, because there's no yearbook of life. I guess that's how little I knew about the production and possibilities of a newspaper back then.
In my senior year, I was appointed editor-in-chief of the yearbook. It was an honor that made me so proud of myself and my work. It was my first major leadership role, which gave me even more to appreciate. Assigning tasks and deadlines, working on page layout, having my team come to me when they needed help, and everything else, I loved it all.
How thankful I am to describe that as my job now.
But then yearbook ended, high school ended. I graduated and wasn't sure what was next.
So I kept on the idea of pursuing photography, which, in all honesty, is still something I love now. But photography helped with my next step: college.
I debated between three schools: College for Creative Studies, Kendall College of Art and Design, and Grand Valley State University, which was one of the only universities with a photography program separate from their art program.
Whether it was the beautiful campus, the distance from home, or something else that drew me to Grand Valley, I trusted my gut feeling to go there, which continues to support my belief that everything happens for a reason.
In my freshman year of college, I was planning to major in photography, but I needed an art credit because, for some reason, all the photography classes I was enrolled in didn't make the gen-ed cut. So, after a friend told me that the creative writing course was both easy and fun, I decided to give it a try. I took the chance knowing I did enjoy writing and that I wouldn't mind an easier second semester.
Being in that class was the first time I realized how incredibly possible it was to pursue a career in writing.
I switched my major three weeks into that semester.
There was some courage I discovered in myself when choosing to pursue writing, which led me to decide to double major -- eventually getting my bachelor's in both writing and studio art. It all started to feel genuinely possible.
For the next three years, I took an array of classes, exploring the sides of writing I never imagined. Sure, there was fiction and nonfiction, but I also loved magazine writing and writing for the Web and working with writers and manuscripts and the other five or so categories all under the same umbrella.
I'd go back to school just to keep taking those classes... well, maybe.
Then, after graduation, when I was ready and excited for what was next, there were months of applying to jobs before my next step was even remotely close. Months where the number of applications I sent rose to more than 200, months where my friends quickly found full-time jobs with their business and health degrees, months where my classmates posted about their new positions not related to writing, months of worrying that everyone was right and maybe I was wrong.
I almost took a job I didn't want in a field I wasn't interested in because I thought it was my only option. I thank the unknown reason why I decided to pass on that one.
When I hit my version of a rock bottom, crying to my mom that I was afraid I had chosen the wrong major, was about the time I discovered the managing editor position available at The News.
I applied, knowing I felt qualified but worried it wouldn't be enough. I waited for another rejection letter to roll around, but, instead, I had an interview.