The only way to live …

… is to be true to one’s self. That was the basic gist of a post from Marc and Angel Hack Life. I’m not sure where I found this particular site, but its one of the few subscriptions to a web site that I have that isn’t finance/debt-related or a food blog.

This one particularly struck me in light of my recent grappling with the “two-year itch” .

I have been lucky that my jobs have corresponded with what I went to school for. I was an English major and I’ve always loved writing. I think that I’ve wrote stories and little essays for as long as I’ve been able to hold a pen. In journalism, the stories I wrote were factual, but they were stories just the same. And yeah, it was a real trip to write my “stories” for an audience of thousands of people. It satisfied a weird part of my ego that I pretend doesn’t exist, but it’s there. It’s the same part of me that sang in the choir or performed in plays while I was in high school – the extrovert just found a different outlet.

Even in my full-time job I still get to put pen to paper (or hands to keyboard as it were) and I can still tell people I write for a living – even if the stories I write this time are much dryer than the murders I used to cover as a rookie reporter or as mundane as the city council meetings I used to attend on a regular basis.

And even if I wasn’t writing as a profession, I’d be finding different outlets to write. (Like … blogs!) I do admit that I’m very lucky – my “hobby” is also what I do for a living and outside of the journalism world, I almost feel like my skills are even more marketable. There are a lot of people in this world who don’t like to write. Well, for those people – some of whom I work with – it is my pleasure to serve. Because writing was what I was born to do and whether it’s proofing a manuscript to make sure that you are using the right usage of “its” or to be a second set of eyes on that letter, I’m happy to help.