What do I want to be when I grow up?

I still think about what I want to be when I grow up, even though I am 38 years old and I think my path is set.

From a very young age, I wanted to be a writer. I loved writing. I loved stories. When I was a kid, my siblings and I slept in one room and for a short time, one bed. I would tell my brother and sister “The Great Story” which was a nightly tale of three kids who were poor but woke up one morning and they were rich. It was us, it was our dream.

And then in my early teens, I held a camera and all of a sudden everything changed. I wanted to be a photographer. For the next 10 years, I would chase the dream until I beat it to death, hated it, and never again wanted to exchange my photographic services for cash. I sucked at it and I was done.

In the 90s being a writer meant novels. In my mind, if I tried hard enough, I could be Judy Blume or Beverly Cleary but by the time I was an adult, that changed. Writers could be anyone because we became lucky enough to live in a time when if you wanted to write something and have it be read, all you had to do was go online and write it.

One of my favorite novels of all time is The Confederacy of Dunces. The writer, John Kennedy Toole, spent his whole life trying to be a writer. He wrote the novel and tried to get it published but was unsuccessful. He felt defeated, depressed, and the novel sat atop of an armoire in his room. In 1969 he committed suicide and after his death, his mother was persistent with getting the novel published. Can you imagine this now? Sure, getting your book published by a well-known publisher is ideal but being turned down should not demotivate a good writer. A driven writer, would just self-publish their content or write a blog and release it slowly, like a series. Being a writer today is not the same as it was when I was a kid, dreaming of writing a novel. A writer can be a blogger, a columnist, or someone who shares tips on social. It’s so different and I love it.

Right now, I am in content marketing, which is a solid combination of my two past dreams - though slightly different since I am not out in the field taking photographs of chubby babies.

I get to write, strategize, ideate, and visualize marketing content for businesses. Pretty cool, right? But what is next? Is this just the adult way? I don’t know… For now, I will just get back to work.