The Year of the Horse

Men with pens scholarship comp entry

I love to write.

So much so that words have become my business.

That makes me sound pretty confident right?

Well, appearances can be deceptive….

For a long time I thought I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had my flitting moments when I thought I wanted to be a hairdresser, vet or marine biologist, but by the age of 16 I’d pretty much decided on the rest of my life.

I was going to be a lawyer.

I was good at debating (love a good argument; still do in fact), was pretty decent at the whole essay writing thing and by nature was a practical and logical person (well, most of the time). It seemed to make perfect sense.

I also had grand visions of wearing a black gown and wig, striding into the High Court with my team of minions, ready to take on the legal system, right wrongs and fight injustice. Hey, everyone’s gotta dream right?

So off I strode to university, confident of the direction my life would take but completely unaware of how differently things would actually turn out….

After five years at uni I was off to a graduate position in Canberra (Australia’s Washington), to work for the government.

If I’m being totally honest, I hadn’t enjoyed the law part of my degree at all (my other degree’s in European history) and I had serious doubts about whether I wanted to be a lawyer at all. But not knowing what else to do, and not being self-aware enough to say ‘stuff it, I’ll do something else’, I went along the same road as everyone else, hearing the beat of a different drum but not knowing how to dance to it.

Cue the first year of my adult working life. And it sucked. Besides the fact that I never had enough to do, what I did have to do was so boring and uninspiring that the thought of continuing on said course for the next 40 years or so was enough to bring tears to my eyes.

My solution to the problem? Run away. To Sydney in fact. I thought if Canberra wasn’t doing it for me (which it surely wasn’t), living in a big city would. And in a way, it did. For 6 months I had the time of my life. Unfortunately, it wasn’t at work.

I had a group of the bestest friends a twenty something could have and my social life was top-notch. The people I worked with were also awesome (saving grace) but the work itself was still thin on the ground in terms of quantity and severely lacking in quality. 

So I started reassessing whether I really didn’t want to be a lawyer. Visions of black robes and horsehair wigs started dancing in my mind and on my return to Canberra I enrolled in a Post Graduate Diploma to quality as a solicitor.

Then followed 7 years of self-induced misery where I tried as hard as could be to convince myself I was exactly where I needed to be. I told myself I’d worked hard to get to this point; I had skills and experience it’d be crazy to walk away from. And, not least of all, what other options did I actually have? Quite a few as it turned out….

One was to walk away. Which I did.

I dropped the law for 6 months or so and qualified as a Pilates instructor. Random, I know, but totally in keeping with what’s important to me. I also ran away. To London.

And it was there that I discovered one of my life’s passions. Travel. But unable to work out how to finance said passion without the law, I dragged myself back. Convincing myself it was merely a means to an end, I struggled on for another 2 years until eventually conceding defeat.

Then I was really lost.

I spent the next 5 ½ years desperately trying to find my place in the world. I knew law and I were not life-long partners so I tried teaching Pilates full time.

No go. I loved the social contact, the uniform and the physicality but grew to resent the hours and the amount of time spent talking (introverts find this exhausting – I certainly did).

I also returned to my default setting (changing locations) and moved to Canada for 12 months. Also no go. Arriving in the depths of the GFC I was only able to find work for 4mths (and I never saw a live moose), marking it yet another failure on the road to career enlightenment (at least in my eyes).

In desperation I thought I’d take a 4 month break to learn French and because nothing else seemed to be working, would return (again) to law. That also was a dead horse. With no jobs to be found (at least for me), I rustled up 5 months of paid employment in 2 years. I also ran away again (this time to France).

On my return I was still sans job (ANY kind of job) and, about to give up on pretty much everything, was offered some copywriting work by a friend who owns an SEO company, opening a door I never knew existed. And it was here that the little light of hope nestled deep in my belly started to come alight again.

I discovered that, despite years of essays, legal opinions, court documents and submissions; I loved to write.

It had gone from something I loved to do as a kid to something I was forced to do for study and for work. It had gone from something creative and expressive and beautiful to something routine and regimented, losing all its colour along the way. I was good at it, but there was nothing whatsoever of me in there.

No expression.

No personality.

No joy.

And even though I started writing about skip bins and medical recruitment, I found I could still put a little bit of myself in there. I could be proud of what I produced. And, much to my surprise, I could enjoy the process of production.

The next logical step was to start my own business and give my words to other people.

So in August last year I threw caution to the wind; registering a business name, getting a website and starting with word of mouth referrals.

My confidence started creeping back, convincing me I wasn’t imagining the dim light at the end of the tunnel – it was real!

I started to believe that yes, I could work for a living and actually enjoy it.

I could be paid to be creative.

I did have a marketable skill I could exploit for profit.

I could change my life.

And so here I find myself.

I have some work. But not enough.

I have some knowledge. But not enough.

I have some talent. But I don’t know how to make the most of it.

So I want to learn.

I want to learn how to harness my skills; unleash my inner creative self; find and embrace my confidence and vanquish my fears. I want to give this business my absolute all; to find success in something I feel passionate about and fulfilled by.

For the first time in my life I believe it’s possible. I believe I can do it. And I’m not afraid to ask for help.

To be in the Damn Fine Words writing course would absolutely change my life.

It’d give me some of the confidence and tools I need to turn my experimental ‘hell, I may as well’ business into a viable entity. My copy will improve; selling itself to prospective clients, helping set me up as someone who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk.

And it’ll be a big part of my life I can look back on and say: ‘That’s where my life changed. That’s where I worked it out. That’s where I made it happen’. And that would mean more to me than words, as beautiful as they are, could ever express.

BTW - if you're confused about the title, it's the year of the horse in the Chinese astrology calendar. Given that I'm a horse, I've decided 2014's the year of me. So I'm going to go get it (this is step 1).