The Path to Change

When I decided to leave IT and go back to being a writer, I was impatient to start my new career. However, when I read articles about writers who had long freelance careers, or younger writers on their second or third books, I beat myself up. I believed that if I hadn't changed careers from copywriting to information technology, I would've been much farther ahead as a writer. Who knows how many books I would've written, or how established my career would've been?

Even after I got a contracting position that drew on my writing and technical experience, I still reproached myself. This went on for quite a while. Finally I had to stop and think. What made me believe that my years in IT were wasted? There’s no rule book saying where we should be at any point in our lives.

Sometimes we may focus on the past in order to stop ourselves from dealing with an uncertain future. We never have to face our fear of what can happen if we're always focusing on what has happened. We don't have to deal with the loss of control that comes when we step into the unknown.

What I’ve learned is that, as the saying goes, you have to begin where you are. I simply took another path to get to where I am now. Not the "wrong" path, but my own path.