If you want my autobiography...

Are you one of those people who has always known what they wanted? I’m not.

As a child, I could never make up my mind. I alternated between ballet, softball and gymnastics every year. My parents had no problem with me doing it all at once. I just got bored after one season. At some point, I mellowed out and competed in gymnastics and played softball at the same time.

That balance was short lived and I decided that softball was my calling, so we invested everything in it. My dad took me to pitching lessons, batting lessons, cross training four times a week, and he even built a batting cage in our backyard. When I wasn't playing in tournaments, I went to every camp and clinic in the area in hopes of being recruited. By my junior year in high school, I was burnt out.

Without softball to focus on, I didn't know what I was supposed to aim for. I had been around gymnastics my whole life, so I started teaching to follow in my mother’s footsteps. I worked there until I felt a daily desire to strangle my boss.

One of my friends helped me get a job at the mall, and I became obsessed with the displays and organization and lining up every display perfectly. I loved being the “specialties girl” who knew where every article of clothing hung and every piece of hardware was stored. I worked at Justice until I started college, when I chose English as my new path.

For a while, I wanted to be a screenwriter. I enjoyed picking out things in movies the producers didn’t seem to notice—character lines that dropped off, wet ground in the middle of a “drought” and so on.  But after several creative writing workshops, I found that I preferred nitpicking everyone else’s work rather than writing my own stories.

I picked up a job copyediting at the school newspaper and fell in love…again. I was there as often as possible and wanted to know everything about AP style. I feared the day I didn’t know the answer to a grammar or style question.

As a favor to one of my friends, I also took a position in my sorority as Standards Board Chair. I held meetings with chapter members when they didn't follow the rules, and came to realize I didn’t hate it like I should have. I enjoyed getting the truth out of people, which led me to where I am now.

All of my misguided attempts to choose a career path have led me to what I hope to be the winner. I’ve learned I have too much passion about any one subject at a time. I have an incessant need to know everything and I pay attention to details in any way I can—clothes, cartwheels or copy.

Without my thousand and one prior jobs, I wouldn’t know now that I’m exactly where I need to be.