Today, I was revising my official decor-related bio for House Digest and remembering not only the years I spent watching HGTV shows in the middle of the night, cross-legged on the floor by the coffee table all through college, but also a very particular camping trip in which I once decided, at 15, that I was definitely going to be an interior designer. Admittedly, it was only after one of those aptitude career tests you take had revealed a predisposition for that particular line of work somehow. While I was enamored of decor magazines even as a teenager, I soon chucked that idea, largely since I came to realize that designers very rarely got carte blanche in making spaces. Even then, I knew I really didn't want to have a career catering to other people's desires. It was one thing to go shopping with my mom every few months and completely redo entire rooms in the house without my dad noticing until the credit card bills arrived. It was another to have to fight tooth and nail over drapery fabric.
It was one of a long list of things I wanted to be or might have been at various points when you are still figuring things out, most of them probably totally doable--law school, psychiatry, politics or activism. Some were impractical, like the several months senior year I wanted to be a Broadway actress. And a couple that I wanted to do--tried to do even--but was ill-suited for--marine science (those shoddy math skills) or teaching (not a nurturing bone in my body and pathological introversion.) The first would land me in North Carolina upon graduation and wind up just not happening. The second would still take me years to figure out.
Writing, while something I did, was good at, and enjoyed greatly, never seemed like an actual career option, though I checked all the requisite boxes--stellar English class essays over four years, a newspaper section editor position, a spot on the yearbook staff. In college, an English major, lit mags and awards and film reviews in the college paper. Writing was something one did, could be good at, but no one I knew, not in person, not even tangentially, made a living actually doing it. That included even things as basic as a newspaper or magazine writing and definitely novels unless we were talking like VC Andrews, Christopher Pike, or Stephen King. Later, the Ernest Hemingways and Emily Dickinsons. The Sylvia Plaths or the Shakespeares. This is to say, not something I thought was in any way open to me here in the midwest, where reading, even then, wasn't something people did much of.
Poetry was maybe something teenage girls scribbled in journals, girls like me anyway, but not something one could pursue even as an art form, much less a career or avocation. I knew by the time I finished my first go-round in grad school that I wanted badly to keep writing it, but needed something more solid to build my financial foundation on. I set out of my MA program, knowing teaching was completely wrong for me, but still looking for some sort of bookish, interesting job I wouldn't hate that allowed me time to write.
While I was a library-lover since childhood, that career also did not seem like something you could just pursue. I had looked at MLS programs around the time I was thinking I might like to get my Ph.D, but neither seemed right. I actually stumbled into my first library job in one kind of randomly after searching months for bookstore or writing-related work in my hometown. I basically took a poorly paid public school job that no one else wanted. Then a poorly paid college library job that I stayed in for two decades. I was actually good at being a librarian even though I stubbornly refused to subject myself to a professional program I knew I would hate. I instead decided to get an MFA, which I also sort of hated, but probably less. And in the end, refused to get a library science degree almost out of spite, even though I did "professional" things like write articles and award applications and present professionally. But I just couldn't stay in the end.
The cool thing about writing is that you sometimes get to live different lives. When I write decor or design articles, I get to be that designer I wanted to be at 15 just a little. When I write horror articles, I get to be the film scholar I sometimes wish I became to just sit around and talk horror 24/7. When I write about restaurants and cooking, I get to play the gourmet I am most definitely not, or the full-time traveler I wish I wanted to be (even though I don't actually like traveling much.) Writing online lesson content, I get to be the budding architecture and art scholar. The smart lit professor. The expert in folklore and mythology (that particular one took hold after watching Virginia Madsen in Candyman as a college freshman.). Writing about vintage and old things, I can imagine I am the mysterious (possibly cursed) antiques dealer in a rather questionable spooky town.
And of course, I also get to be the poet the rest of the time. And the artist and designer. The editor and curator. All of which I guess, miraculously, I somehow am for reals. And sometimes all of it seems impractical and I'm not sure how I got here exactly. Or how that 15-year-old just setting feelers out in the world wound up here. Only that it is exactly the right place.
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