When I was completing my English degree in 2003-2006, I was thrilled to find that I had been a writer all my life, even though I hadn’t realized it. I have mentioned before that I envy those writers who knew, as soon as they read their first life-changing book, that they, too, would one day be an author. That’s not how it happened for me.

I loved reading as a kid. My mother read to us every night when we were small, we always had access to books at home and library cards to the local library. I even remember sitting in the bathroom reading the long words on the backs of shampoo bottles, just because I loved the sound of language. So, words were definitely a fave. But I was, in my mind, an artist.

Then life happened… (cue the elevator music).

At age 38 I found myself, as a single mom, needing to complete my degree in order to qualify for the kinds of jobs that would pay me enough to support myself and my two kids. I went to my admissions counselor to discuss options:

Counselor: What degree program are you interested in declaring for?

Single Mom: What will take the fewest classes and shortest amount of time?

Counselor: Looks like English.

Single Mom: That works.

I didn’t intend to teach, so I decided to take the “Creative Writing” trajectory rather than a more traditional, grammar-laden one. (I thought I was an artist, remember?)

It was in one of those creative writing classes that I realized, with some measure of disappointment, that I was simply not going to be writing the next great American novel. I could not get into the required plot summarization, the character development, the outlining… nothing was coming to me organically about any of that.

Now, I realize that writing is a practice, and that sometimes you have to write through the places where things don’t come to you. But I just felt like I wasn’t creative enough to come up with ideas out of my head. I didn’t have any stories in me.

That all changed when I took a class called The Art of the Personal Essay. HO.LY. COW. Yeah, that was it. I knew, in an instant, that I was an essayist. I had been journaling for decades. I had even won an essay contest online before this point, all the while still not realizing I was a writer. Amazing how the voices in our own heads can block out what our soul knows to be real so completely, isn’t it?

I put the feelings that I had failed in my creative writing efforts behind me and embraced this new (to me) medium of writing essays. And now, I’m looking ahead and actually putting together a first draft for a novel-length piece of fiction, and maybe even some shorter pieces to submit somewhere.

Life happens just the way it’s supposed to. But, sometimes, we have to stop and listen – and maybe get out of our own way.