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| Image credit: Photo posted on UADDit (along with other pictures of amazing Lego art!) |
I grew up believing that there was a formula for building a career. Jobs were like packaged construction sets: you picked the single set you liked best, followed the instructions, laying down one piece of education or experience at a time, until you had assembled that dump truck or starship or hospital or national monument.
I had a few problems. First, I could never decide which one career to settle on to pick. I'd consider and discard one after another, even starting to put together several of the kits, then petulantly scrapping each one and starting on the next when I found it wasn't quite what I wanted. None of those boxes really fit me, yet I couldn't see beyond them.
And then there was that perfectionist in me bringing up the thorny matter of success. Once I did build a set, the work wasn't done. I couldn't, for example, just write anything: I'd have to write for publication, because that had the prestige. And I couldn't just be published: I'd have to be published in the New Yorker or write a bestseller. And I couldn't just be published in a big name way: I'd have to win a Nobel or Pulitzer Prize. There was no being satisfied. There was always another big prize off in the distance.
Earlier this year, stood in my bedroom and told my husband, with tears in my eyes, that I had come to feel this strange new sense of faith and a new satisfaction. I had a growing feeling that, through the blog, I was building my own creation. The ad money I was getting wasn't much, but it was trickling in: a penny here, a dollar there. The reader base wasn't huge, but it was growing. And I had this beautiful sense that I was, for the first time in my life, doing something that I really loved and touching other people's lives. I began to see that maybe it was possible that a career writing the kinds of things I wanted didn't have to rely on finding an agent or submitting query letters or begging publisher after publisher fighting off the despair at growing piles of rejection letters to finally get that break. Maybe I didn't need to be published in any conventional sense. Maybe this was all I needed, and it would work, if I worked at it and trusted in it.
The very next morning a woke up and found that Mary Ann had sent me a message with the subject line "Gratitude" along with a gift to tell me she was thankful for what I shared on this blog. God moment.
Now, months later, on the same day I got an e-mail from Google letting me know that they had banned me from AdSense for life, I was offered an opportunity to participate in a new writing project.* One door closed and another door opened. God moment.
Then last week I was reading ProBlogger and saw a post on how to write an ebook. "Hm," I thought, "I don't want to deal with publishing, but an ebook I could do. I get people e-mailing me all the time who are lost in the wake of discovering a partner's sex addiction, asking what to do and where to turn, just like I did. I should write a book for those partners in the first throes of coming to terms with sex addiction!"** I excitedly shared this idea with my husband, who thought it sounded fantastic. A day later, Chatti Patti posted about a dream she had in which I was selling my own books, which were insubstantial and paper thin, not like real printed books. God moment.
Now you all may read the tea leaves of my life differently, but what I see is the big flashing arrow of the universe pointing me in one direction. And I hear a voice inside me saying, "Keep doing this, honey. And what's more, do it even more. Make your own box. Build your own construction set. You are exactly where you're supposed to be right now and you're going exactly where you're supposed to be going."
* More on the new opportunity as soon as I can share details.
** More on the ebook idea tomorrow.
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