I Think I’m Grown

Today’s theme at Girl Talk Thursday is “What did you want to be when you grew up?”

I knew the answer to this question at a very early age, I just ignored it for over thirty years.

Putting that aside for the moment, the first red herring career I decided upon was being a veterinarian. I was constantly reading as a child. I was the one with a paperback wedged inside my textbook at school, and the one in bed with a flashlight every night after lights out because I just had to finish a book.

The series of books by James Herriot, the pen name of an English country veterinary surgeon and writer, made a large impression on me. I just knew my calling was to be a large animal vet. At the time, I was living on an historic plantation in Natchez, Mississippi and had three horses of my very own. Things were working out nicely until I became a teenager and nearly overnight lost interest in anything not directly related to getting through high school without being eaten alive.

In college I blindly followed the lead of one of my guy friends who was an accounting major and planning to go to law school. I signed up with the plan that an accounting degree plus a law degree equaled big money, despite the fact that I despised facts and figures with a passion. I didn’t say it was a good plan.

Luckily, an internship with my hometown’s District Attorney the last semester of law school allowed a passion for criminal law to blossom and saved me from the fate of crunching numbers as a tax attorney at a big firm. After graduation I moved to Tampa and landed my first real job as a felony line attorney at the Public Defender’s Office. I loved it, but it wasn’t really a forever job. It was the ideal training ground to be a litigator, though, and I moved on to work at a law firm, and then to my own firm with a partner.

My years as an attorney never gave me a sense of fulfillment, despite the fact that I was fairy good at what I was doing. I stopped working for a while to have kids, then worked in real estate off and on. Real estate paid well and was the perfect flexible job, but it never felt like a perfect match.

When I became aware of the world of blogging, I jumped right in and it felt like a revelation. Finally, an outlet for all of my creativity and a way to get the gratification of publishing that my unfinished books, screenplays and sitcom pilots weren’t providing.

It was only when I started a blog and began freelance writing that I recalled my first passion from long ago. I was a writer in first grade. I wrote a short story about a classmate’s brother and asked to read it to my class. Asking to speak in front of my entire class was so not my nature growing up that I know with certainty that writing and needing to share my work was a powerful force in me.

I was not able to tap into my true calling until I was 42, but that’s okay, at least I know I am now grown.