I have finally accepted that I’m a writer

About a month ago at my day job, I was assigned an urgent writing task. I managed to turn around some squeaky clean copy at warp speed that quickly moved up the chain with no edits.

“I feel like James does this in his sleep,” my colleague wrote in an email.

She wasn’t wrong.

“Haha,” I wrote back. “It’s real easy. All you need to do is write 1,500 articles and columns over 10 years under insane deadline pressure at a major daily newspaper.”

One thing that not a lot of people know about me (until now, I guess), is that, for the most part, I hated being a journalist. It was one of those things that I started doing and turned out to be good at. So for a good dozen or so years, that’s what I did.

Throughout those 12 years, all I did was look for a way to escape writing as a career. I went down all kinds of paths, some sillier than others.

Searching for … something

I wanted to be an artist. I studied for the LSAT for a while before tapering off. If you’re old enough to remember the Chris Moneymaker poker boom, I even had dreams of playing cards professionally. Graphic design, stock trading, entrepreneur … you name it, I probably thought about trying to become it.