My Journey to "Writer": Part 2

In the first part of this series, you discovered my passion for chocolate and travel. We explored why I am emphatic in my love for writing and why I never considered writing as a career. I told you about how going to college forced me to decide what I wanted to do and how it crushed me when I found out that I likely wouldn't be able to live out my dream of being a communication auditor.

So, auditing communications for companies across the globe didn't work out for me. But you know what? It all worked out for the best. After all, I get to do what I love every day. I write full time for a tech company, but I am also lucky enough to write for fun for my newsletter and my freelance clients.

But how did I get here?

Once I graduated from college, I was lost. I thought I wanted to be a communication auditor, but I also needed to pay the bills and start some career, so I did what most people who don't know what they want as a career do: I got a job doing customer service.

From customer service rep to business development rep to writer

If the name wanderluster didn't make it clear enough, I am in love with travel. So, when I saw a job at a private aviation company that was the equivalent of being pilots' customer service reps, I jumped at the opportunity. Turns out, the job wasn't at all what I expected.

Instead of getting all the exciting perks you'd expect from a private aviation company, I dragged myself to work every day, completely miserable. We didn't get free flights or colossal travel discounts. Instead, I worked with a group of people far less ambitious than myself (so I typically took on some of their workloads by default) and essentially babysat pilots all day.

And if you need to know only one thing about pilots, it's that they're the world's biggest babies. I got cursed out by angry pilots nearly every week. Any joy or excitement I had about working for a company centered on travel quickly faded, and I became stressed and exhausted. The job was sucking the life out of me. So when I had the opportunity to move to Atlanta and find another job—any job, really—I didn't think twice.

Atlanta is where everything began to change. It took me nearly six months to get a job when I moved. Yes, I was stressed seeing my savings slowly drain, but I was more worried about not finding my dream job and being bored. I don't do well when I'm bored.

The solution? I started a personal blog about living in the south as a midwesterner solely as a way to entertain myself while looking for a paying job. I didn't consider myself an exceptional writer by any means, but I was able to amass a good following, and more importantly, I thoroughly enjoyed writing about my experiences. Then it all started to click.

I researched what it takes to be a writer, and the most important thing was always a portfolio. So I sought out freelance clients—paid or unpaid—to build up my portfolio. I found a few gigs on Fiverr, but certainly nothing that could pay the bills. I kept building my portfolio, hoping I would eventually get to where I wanted to be. In the meantime, I had to start making money.

My next job was as a business development representative working with a small startup. I hate sales with every fiber of my being, but I am damn good at it. I earned hefty paychecks from commissions and was finally able to contribute to my savings again. After a year, I was stable enough and had a decent enough portfolio to start looking for writing roles. Luckily for me, one of my colleagues' partners worked for Amazon... and they were looking for a copywriter.

His partner launched my writing career, and I never looked back. I worked with Amazon for a year doing email campaigns, writing product descriptions, writing website copy, and more. Then I moved to another startup, building my portfolio along the way. I bounced between corporate jobs, startups, and freelance work until I finally landed my true dream job with Cisco nearly two years ago. Once someone took a chance on me, it seemed that everyone was willing to take a chance on me.

Struggles every step of the way

As you can tell from my previous careers, writing wasn't my initial career path. And even once I decided that it was something I wanted to pursue, I wholeheartedly doubted my abilities. I struggled every step of the way.

1. Freelance work. It took me a long time to find clients who would work with someone (for free) with no writing experience and even longer to find clients who were willing to take a chance with me and pay me for my work. Finding projects was damn near impossible, so gaining a reputation, building a reputable portfolio, and getting people to trust my work was challenging.

2. Building an impressive portfolio. No clients, no projects, no work to show off. Sure, I had my blog, but that's wasn't anything I was comfortable showing off. Over nearly a decade, I built my portfolio of work, most of it coming after I established myself. But I never gave up, no matter how slowly projects came in. I was in it for the long run.

3. Imposter syndrome. We've all been there. You get a challenging project, make a big mistake, or have a flat-out bad day, and your mind starts telling you that you can't do your job. You don't have the skills necessary. You don't know what you're doing.

I dealt with this every time a client trusted me to write something spectacular for them. I was overwhelmed by that feeling when Cisco hired me. I still get that feeling! But I often remind myself of my passion and the exemplary landing pages, emails, and blogs I have already written.

As frustrating as it was in the moment, my struggles highlighted something important: my passion. I would never go through being broke for months on end, constant rejection, endless hours of free work, insanely slow progress building up my portfolio, and self-doubt for something that didn't matter to me. Writing is my everything, as cheesy as that sounds, and I am so happy I stuck with it.

I now live a life I love. I balance freelance work with a full-time job, write a newsletter for fun, and do pro bono work for nonprofits. I write when I'm bored. How fortunate am I that my journey ended this way? I found my place in the career world.