My Alternate Path to Becoming a Writer

During my first years of sobriety I had too many jobs, struggling to keep any of them. I washed dishes, sold running shoes, and was a personal assistant to a rich housewife. I sold clothes and knives, and then, was a framer at an ultra high end framing store.

Early on I was so broke I remember counting out dimes and nickels to pay for food. My fellow running shoe store workers, equally broke, advised me on the cheapest spots. At the time, I lived in an efficiency with a broken stove, so cooking was out.

It was a survival period. I scraped by, doing whatever work I could get. I went to AA meetings at night and showed up for work in the morning tired and anxious but I kept showing up. In those early days of sobriety, that mattered.

Eventually, I decided I wanted a career and went back to school. I began taking internships at inpatient psychiatric hospitals in my area. The work was different every day. Some days I sat with anorexic patients, supervising them during lunch, watching the struggle to eat the smallest of portions. I learned how much food can represent fear, control, defiance, and surrender. On other days, I sat in on group therapy for the alcoholics and addicts, listening to stories of survival.

Sometimes stories of despair. Sometimes both at once.

When I went to graduate school, I focused on working with autistic kids, learning as much as I could about neurodivergence. Every client taught me something new about perception, communication, and trust. I learned how many of our social expectations are arbitrary. I learned how much the world expects people to perform a version of themselves that may not feel natural. I learned that patience is not passive. It is active, attentive work.

Each job showed me a new way of seeing the world. In some jobs I experienced the entitlement of others. Think shoving the fat feet of wealthy housewives into narrow running shoes or selling four hundred dollar cashmere sweaters. In other jobs, I learned how my own cognitive privilege lessened my life challenges. My autistic clients, in particular, come to mind.

The contrast stayed with me. One moment I would be catering to customers whose worst problem that day was the perfect frame for their Picasso. The next, I would be sitting with a child who had worked for months to communicate for the first time. It shifted my sense of what matters and what does not.

Interacting with so many different people has had more impact on my writing than any workshop. The work ethic required when washing dishes. The social acumen required when selling things. The understanding that I am lucky to have the skills granted to me by virtue of being born into the body I have. All of it has informed every word I have inscribed.

Writing is often presented as an intellectual pursuit. But so much of it is about paying attention. Knowing when to lean in. Knowing when to step back. Listening for what is not said. I learned those skills in kitchens, in stores, in hospital rooms.

Not in classrooms.

I did not follow a linear path to writing. I do not have a pedigree or a perfect list of credits. What I have is experience. Lived, earned, carried.

Here is to the alternate path. The one where life experience trumps schooling and where every odd job, every difficult day, every person we meet has something to teach us if we are paying attention.